کیفیت حسابرسی در طول بحران مالی جهانی: دیدگاه سرمایه گذاران Audit quality during the global financial crisis: The investors’ perspective

1. Introduction Auditors play an important role in the promotion of public listed firms and the development of financial markets (McGrath et al. 2001). Auditors increase the trust between a firm and its current and prospective investors by giving an independent opinion as to whether financial statements give a true and fair view of the financial position of the company. As the auditors’ role is important in helping investors in making informed decisions and enhancing the integrity of financial markets, regulators around the world always strive to improve the quality of audits performed by the auditors. The recent global financial crisis (GFC) led regulators’ and financial media to question whether auditors duly discharged their auditing duties. For instance, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) accused auditors of not having applied the PCAOB auditing standards in connection with areas (income statement and balance sheet accounts) that were significantly affected by the economic crisis. Similarly, the collapses of ‘too big to fail institutions’ encouraged financial press to comment, “where were the auditors” (Woods et al., 2009) and to suggest that “it makes sense to review the audit market, because of the financial crisis”.1, 2 The discussion among the regulators and financial media motivated several researchers to discuss whether auditors provided adequate warning beforehand about the deteriorating financial position of firms that ultimately filed for bankruptcy (Sikka, 2009; Woods et al., 2009) and to investigate whether auditors discharged their duties properly during the GFC (Geiger et al., 2014; Xu et al., 2013; Xu et al., 2011) or whether firms’ themselves had preference for the better audit quality during the GFC (Persakis and Iatridis, 2016). While these studies contribute to our understanding of the quality and independence of auditors during the GFC, these studies provide evidence of audit quality by looking at the auditors’ behavior, level of audit efforts exerted and firms motivation for high audit quality during the GFC. That is these studies provide evidence from auditors’ and firms’ perspective. However, there is hardly any study that examines audit quality by investigating the change in investors’ trust and reliance on financial statements audited by auditors during the GFC, that is evidence from the investors’ perspective. Our study attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining the change in the information content of earnings announcements, a dimension of accounting quality, during the GFC. We consider a study on the examination of the audit quality from investors’ perspective during the GFC to be important because: (i) regulators consider investors to be the primary user of financial statements3 , (ii) the very purpose of audit of financial statements is to enhance their credibility and hence increase the investors’ trust and reliance on them in decision making, (iii) there are some suggestions that the investors perception of the audit quality might have suffered soon after the onset of the GFC. For instance, Sikka (2009; page. 871) notes that “… the current financial crisis shows that markets and significant others were not comforted by unqualified audit opinions issued by major audit firms”.