Dynamics of Audit Quality: Behavioural Approach and Governance Framework: UK Evidence

Abstract

The research objective is to study and analyse different factors potentially involved in influencing the measuring of auditor behaviour and audit quality that would lead to auditorsꞌ failure. It covers areas related to auditing, accounting, and corporate governance. The first empirical study assesses auditors' behaviour against audit firm factors (time deadline, time budget and performance evaluation). It also explains how behaviour may differ among experienced auditors and audit trainees. The results show that the majority of auditors commit dysfunctional behaviour but they try to avoid it in technical audit areas. The majority of auditors knowingly commit dysfunctional behaviour for the sake of better performance. It is noted that some of dysfunctional behaviour acts are due to a misperception of the concept of dysfunctional behaviour during an audit assignment. Auditors assume they are contributing to the benefit of an audit assignment while in fact they are committing dysfunctional behaviour.

The second empirical model is constructed to assess the theoretical and statistical relationship between audit quality and clients' corporate governance characteristics. As for corporate governance mechanisms, the results show that audit quality has a significant positive relationship with board of directors' size and independence and a negative relationship with role duality. It can be concluded that within the British context, a bigger board of directors with diverse backgrounds leads to better audit quality. Also, more independent directors lead to better audit quality.

For audit committee variables and their impact on audit quality, the results show that there is no significant statistical relationship between audit committee independence and size and audit quality; but there is a positive significant relationship between audit committee meetings and audit quality. This result gives an indicator that the more active audit committees in British companies, the better audit quality is achieved.