Since managers can conduct management activities for their own interests rather than to maximize corporate value, shareholders implement controls such as performance evaluation and compensation to reduce managers’ goal-inconsistent behavior. Howev...
Since managers can conduct management activities for their own interests rather than to maximize corporate value, shareholders implement controls such as performance evaluation and compensation to reduce managers’ goal-inconsistent behavior. However, earnings-based compensation granted to these managers can also provide an incentive to act for the manager’s private interests. As a result, it can appear as a material misstatement of the financial statements, and in terms of audit, it can affect the control environment and increase the control risk. In the end, there is a possibility that audit fees and audit hours will increase because external auditors must invest a lot of audit efforts due to increased audit risk when signing an audit contract. Based on this, this study focuses on the granting of earnings-based compensation to managers who are primarily responsible for preparing financial statements, and studies whether the characteristics of the audit committee affect the relationship between earnings-based compensation, audit fees, and audit hours for companies listed on the stock market from 2013 to 2021.
According to the empirical analysis results of this study, only audit hours increase for companies with a managers’ earnings-based compensation. This is because granting earnings-based compensation to managers affects the control environment, and the audit effort increases relatively as the risk of material misstatement of the financial statements due to this control risk increases. In addition, companies with managers’ earnings-based compensation appear to have a lower audit fees per audit hours. This is because auditors invest relatively more audit hours than audit fees to reach a high level of confidence. However, the analysis of the relation between the earnings-based compensation and audit fees and audit hours is not affected by the characteristics of the audit committee, which is divided into whether the audit committee is established, the size of the audit committee, and whether the audit committee includes accounting or financial experts. However, the results of an additional analysis by extending the sample period to 2022 show that companies with managers’ earnings-based compensation increases both audit fees and audit hours, and this relationship appears to be alleviated by the characteristics of the audit committee.
Since stock prices can be influenced by common factors in the market rather than the efforts of managers, there may be noise in performance evaluation in the case of stock-based compensation. In contrast, this study is significant in that it analyzes the effects of the manager’s earnings-based compensation based on external auditors’ evaluation of earnings-based compensation granted to managers.