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- 저자 : 허진숙(공동저자) ( Jin Suk Heo ) (검색결과 1 건)
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권수영 ( Soo Young Kwon ),정경철(교신저자) ( Kyoung Chol Jung ),허진숙(공동저자) ( Jin Suk Heo ) 한국회계학회 2016 회계학연구 Vol.41 No.2
Low-balling is the loss-leading practice of setting audit fees below total current costs during initial audit engagements to better compete for large and prestigious clients (DeAngelo 1981). Legislators, regulators and practitioners have raised concerns about low balling for a long time due to the prevalence of auditors’ initial-year audit fee cutting practices in Korea to obtain new audit engagements. For example, Hyundai Mipo Dockyard Company and Hyundai Samho Heavy Industries Company switched their new auditors in 2014 and paid lower audit fees lower than those they previously paid to old auditors by around 43%. While an auditor incurs a loss in the initial audit engagement due to the discounted audit fees, the auditor may view the client primarily as a future income stream. Thus, the concern is the combination of pricing and tenure where an auditor must retain a client to recoup costs and ultimately achieve profitability. Korean regulatory authorities can designate external auditors for firms with quite low audit fees because of auditor independence concerns. But none of the two companies’ auditors have been designated for the practices of aggressive audit fee cutting. The purpose of this paper is to understand the determinants of low-balling, defined as audit pricing below audit cost in the first-year. Prior research has focused on initial-year audit fee cutting rather than low balling because audit cost data is not available. We analyze annual reports of Big 4 accounting firms in Korea and find that operating income over sales is around 2.91% on average and net income over sales is around 1.36%. We also break labor costs into fixed and variable costs because low-balling decision by auditors can be made based on variable costs. Through these analyses, we assume that the average percentage of contribution margin is around 18%. Based on this estimate, we operationalize low-balling by assuming that low-balling exists if an audit fee is less than the expected audit fee by 20 percent or more. We also employ alternative cutoffs such as 15% and 25% to define low-balling as sensitivity checks. And then, we consider the economic factors of low-balling, such as auditor concentration ratio, auditor industry specialization, auditor turnover, non-audit service fees, auditees’ risk and client importance. Based on panel datasets of audit fee disclosures from 2003 to 2014, our empirical results provide evidence that auditors tend to low-ball if clients are large. This result could be due to the fact that an auditor has no room for audit fee discounts for small clients companies since the auditor still has to follow mandatory audit procedures even for small firms Or an auditor is willing to provide audit fee discounts for large clients since they are in general less riskier than small clients. In contrast, auditors are less likely to low-ball if client importance is high, client business risk is high, or auditor turnover is high. These results show that non-price competition becomes important when a client is important, risky and has high auditor turnover history. We also find that auditors are more likely to low-ball for downward auditor changes, not horizontal changes. Upward auditor changes are related with low-balling when it is only compared to changes from a non-Big 4 auditor to a non-Big 4 auditor. The effect of auditor’s industry specialization on low-balling decisions depend on the cutoff points employed to define low-balling, indicating that the relationship between auditor specialization and low-balling may not be linear. We do not find evidence on the effects of auditor concentration, non-audit services and previous auditor tenure on low-balling. In additional analyses, we conduct the analyses by splitting the sample based on the type of auditor change. Low-balling is pronounced for the downward auditor change, while low-balling is observed only for the horizontal change between non-big auditors. We also show that the low-balling measures based on the cutoff percentages from prior-year audit fees may lead to the misclassification of low-balling engagements since audit fees can be affected by various factors such as client size, risk, and complexity. Our findings remain unchanged even after controlling the number of CPAs and listed companies and the ratio of the two numbers to ensure that the results of low balling determinants are not driven by the increase in the number of CPAs in Korea. We suggest that understanding low-balling determinants may provide useful information to regulators, practitioners, and financial statement users since low-balling is driven by auditors’ economic incentives, which may eventually affect audit quality.
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