earticle

영어

The standard audit hours policy was introduced in order to fundamentally improve the reliability of accounting information. So this study seeks to provide empirical evidence on the effectiveness of ‘the standard audit hours policy’ introduced under the amendment of Act on External Audit of Stock Companies. To analyze the effectiveness, I focus on the revision of preliminary earnings because this method can measure audit quality more directly relative to discretionary accruals or audit hours. In theory, the quality of audit service is determined by the joint possibility of detecting accounting breach and reporting the breach. Actually, the probability of finding accounting errors and fraud increases as the auditor's audit effort increases, and the probability of reporting found accounting errors and fraud increases as the auditor's independence increases. Accordingly a standard audit hour policy was introduced to normalize and secure audit effort. Standard audit hour refers to the audit hour that an auditor must invest in order to faithfully comply with the accounting audit standards and maintain appropriate audit quality. The results of empirical analyses are as follows. First, as a result of logistic regression analysis using whether firms’ preliminary earnings reported through fair disclosure is modified by the auditor, when the amount of correction is large(more than 5% of the firm's fixed profit), I find that the frequency of correction of pre-liminary earnings in 2019, when the standard audit hours policy was implemented, significantly increased compared to 2018, the year immediately before the policy was implemented. Second, as a result of performing ordinary least squares analysis( OLS) using the adjusted amount of preliminary earnings, I find that the standard audit hours policy significantly increased the adjusted amount of preliminary earnings in all research models. Third, the results of the research conducted by selecting 2018 and 2019 as the sample period shows that the robustness was maintained even if the sample period is set differently or the sample companies by year are matched. The empirical results show that the standard audit hours policy allows the auditor to devote sufficient hours to the audit and it is interpreted as the possibility of demanding the issuance of financial statements by correcting accounting errors increased. In other words, it can be said that the result coincided with the purpose of the amendment of Act on External Audit of Stock Companies, and this result is expected to have implications for the supervisory authorities and the working-level community. The contribution of this study is using preliminary earnings that can be said to be a proxy for pre-audit financial statements instead of using indirect measures such as discretionary accruals or audit time (or audit fee) to verify the effectiveness of standard audit hour policy. However, the limitations of the research methodology of this study are that the criteria for judging whether or not significant preliminary earnings are revised may be arbitrary and that the analyses are performed using only the preliminary earnings among various provisional results. Therefore, it will be necessary to consider these limitations in interpreting the empirical results of this study.

한국어

개정된 신외감법에서 가장 주목을 받은 제도는 표준감사시간 제도와 주기적 지정제이며, 신외감법의 시행 효과를 검증하기 위하여 본 연구가 초점을 맞춘 제도는 표준감사시간 제도이다. 본 연구는 감사품질의 개선효 과를 재량적 발생액 등 간접적 감사품질 측정치를 사용하는 대신, 잠정이익의 수정 여부 및 수정 금액을 측정 하여 분석하였다. 본 연구의 실증분석 결과를 요약하면 다음과 같다. 첫째, 잠정이익이 감사를 통해 수정되는 지 여부를 확인하기 위한 로지스틱 회귀분석에서는 표준감사시간 제도 시행 후 잠정이익 수정 빈도가 유의적 으로 증가하였다는 사실을 발견하였다. 둘째, 잠정이익의 수정 금액을 이용한 OLS 회귀분석에서도 표준감사 시간 제도 시행 후 잠정이익 수정 금액을 유의하게 증가하였음을 확인하였다. 셋째, 표본기간을 다르게 설정 하거나 표본기간 동안 잠정이익을 모두 공시한 표본기업을 선정한 실증분석에서도 동일한 결과가 나타났다. 이와 같은 실증결과는 표준감사시간 제도로 인해 충분한 시간을 감사에 투입할 수 있게 된 감사인이 재무제 표에 포함되어 있는 회계 오류나 이익조정을 보다 잘 발견할 수 있게 되었고, 발견된 회계 오류 등을 수정하 도록 기업에게 요구할 수 있게 되었다고 해석할 수 있다. 따라서 본 연구의 실증결과는 신외감법의 시행 효과 에 관심이 있는 감독당국과 실무계에도 시사하는 점이 있을 것으로 기대한다.