In January 2019, the Anti-Corruption & Civil Rights Commission prepared ‘Measures for preventing financial and accounting fraud at universities’ for the improvement of the autonomous control system of universities and advised the Ministry of Educa...
In January 2019, the Anti-Corruption & Civil Rights Commission prepared ‘Measures for preventing financial and accounting fraud at universities’ for the improvement of the autonomous control system of universities and advised the Ministry of Education and Korea Advancing Schools Foundation to improve institutions. The subject of the advice was the introduction of a standard audit hours system to promote the effectiveness of the external audit of private universities, the security of the independence of a self-audit organization and the protection of internal reporters of frauds. To ensure the need for the standard audit hours system of private universities and prepare measures, it is necessary to understand the regulations that introduced the standard audit hours system of enterprises through the revision of the External Audit Act in November 2017 and analyze the present condition of audit hours of private universities. This study outlines the discussions that proceeded till the standard audit hours policy for enterprises became legislated and examines changes in the related laws.
Currently, all private universities in South Korea conclude contracts with Non-big 4 auditors. Thus, the weight of junior accountants in small and medium accounting firms is relatively less compared to large companies, and they have greater standard proficiency, the proficiency coordination factor cannot but increase as well. Thus, the increase in the expected standard audit hours may aggravate the burden of private universities. To minimize this, standard audit hours of private universities should cautiously be determined based on empirical evidences, considering their audit environment. Moreover, it is necessary to reflect the audit hours determinants related to audit quality on drawing the standard audit hours of private universities so that the standard audit hours system promotes audit quality. To collect empirical evidence on the factors affecting the audit hours of private universities, a limited regression analysis of the impact of the size of private universities on audit hours was conducted. As a result, except for graduate universities, usually, the asset size of private universities has a significant impact on audit hours.
It turned out that in graduate universities, audit fees rather than the asset size had a more significant impact on audit hours. Since audit fees are decided, reflecting the audit workload and audit risk, it is assumed that the audit workload and risk of graduate universities are greatly affected by factors other than the asset size. In addition, a relatively lower value of the coefficient of determination of junior colleges means that there are other factors substantively more greatly affecting these group audit hours.
For designing the standard audit hours system that could contribute to the promotion of accounting transparency, it is necessary to reflect the elements that have effective impacts on audit effort and audit quality in standard audit hours, rather than presenting uniform standard audit hours according to the size or type of private universities. The auditor can recognize audit risks in advance by reflecting them in the standard audit hours of private universities and can reduce audit failures by throwing additional audit effort if there is a high audit risk. Reflecting accounting quality and operational risk explicitly in deciding on standard audit hours can note that the level of overall compliance of the operation of institutions like the reliability of internal control, the soundness of governance structure, and the importance and frequency of statutory violations are directly connected to private universities’ audit fees. It is expected that this will motivate the transparent operation of private universities so that there will be no factors that increase audit costs. This study is expected to contribute to the enhancement of accounting transparency of private universities by providing th...