Key Audit Matters, Auditor Industry Expertise And Accounting Information Quality

The traditional audit reports have the problems of formatting and templating,and their information content has been criticized.In order to increase the information content of audit reports,audit standard setting institutions in various countries have carried out audit report reform.In order to meet the needs of users of audit reports for incremental information and achieve synchronous development with international auditing standards,the Ministry of Finance approved the issuance of 12 auditing standards for Chinese certified public accountants in December 2016.One of the core contents of the new standards is to add key audit matters in the audit report and disclose the key and difficult points in the audit work and the corresponding procedures.The original intention of the reform is to increase the information content of the audit report,but there is no consensus on whether the reform will achieve the desired effect in the academic community.Based on the background,this thesis uses the literature synthesis research method,the normative research method and the empirical research method,and takes the principal-agent theory,the information asymmetry theory,the signaling theory and the reputation theory as the theoretical basis,to specifically analyze the impact of the disclosure of key audit matters on the quality of accounting information and the impact of the number of key audit matters disclosed on the quality of accounting information,and analyzes the moderating effect of the auditor’s industry expertise on the relationship between the two.On the basis of theoretical analysis,this thesis takes all A-share listed companies from 2012 to 2021 as samples,and empirically tests the impact of disclosure of key audit matters on the quality of enterprise accounting information by constructing a multiple regression model.In addition,this thesis replaces the measurement method of the explained variable,and regresses the sample after matching the propensity score to prove the robustness of the empirical results and further support the hypothesis of this thesis.This thesis draws three main conclusions: First,the disclosure of key audit matters is significantly positively related to the quality of enterprise accounting information.Second,the number of key audit matters is significantly positively related to the quality of enterprise accounting information.Third,when the accounting firm has more industry expertise,the positive correlation between the disclosure of key audit matters and the quality of enterprise accounting information is more significant.The possible contribution of this thesis is to empirically test the policy effect of the disclosure of key audit matters on the quality of accounting information in the audit report reform and the correlation between the number of key audit matters disclosed and the quality of accounting information,and analyze the impact of auditor industry expertise as a moderator variable on the correlation between the disclosure of key audit matters and the quality of accounting information.The research conclusions not only support the beneficial impact of the audit report reform,It also broadens the perspective of research on key audit matters.