Maandblad Voor Accountancy en Bedrijfseconomie 90(9): 352-351, doi: 10.5117/mab.90.31359
Opportunities to improve the measurement of audit quality: a call for collaboration between the profession and academics
Jeroen van Raak,
Ulrike Thürheimer
Corresponding author:
Jeroen van Raak
(
j.j.f.vanraak@uu.nl
)
© 2018 Jeroen van Raak, Ulrike Thürheimer. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits to copy and distribute the article for non-commercial purposes, provided that the article is not altered or modified and the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
van Raak J, Thürheimer U (2016) Opportunities to improve the measurement of audit quality: a call for collaboration between the profession and academics. Maandblad Voor Accountancy en Bedrijfseconomie 90(9): 352-351. https://doi.org/10.5117/mab.90.31359 | ![Open Access](/i/open_access_icon_colour.svg) |
Abstract
Audit research relies on a wide range of publicly available measures to examine which factors influence the quality of financial statement audits. While research to date has to rely largely on remote proxies due to a lack of access to proprietary data, there is considerable doubt about the validity of these proxies and the inferences drawn based on these proxies. In order to provide insight into the reliability of these measures, Rajgopal, Srinivasan & Zheng (2015) investigate whether commonly used proxies for audit quality (i.e. auditor size, abnormal audit fees, accrual quality, and the propensity to meet and beat analyst targets) are associated with deficiencies reported in SEC investigations and class-action lawsuits. Such alleged deficiencies reflect how external stakeholders assess audit performance. Their study indicates that the use of such proxies is highly problematic and that the performance of these measures, with the exception of auditor size, is poor.