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This paper relates auditor’s experience and audit quality, making an important contribution to the understanding of the quality drivers.
The literature suggests that auditors specialized in a specific industry tend to be more precise in detecting errors, delivering a better audit quality. In this paper, I hypothesize auditor’s performance depends not only on specific knowledge, but mostly on work experience accumulated through time.
I measure audit experience by the number of years that an auditor has in profession since registration. Audit quality is defined using Jones (1991) accruals methodology on earnings management accruals methodology. I assume that higher absolute discretionary accrual means lower quality. The study includes the 500 biggest companies in Portugal excluding Financial Services industry over the period 1997 to 2007.
The empirical evidence does not fully supports my hypothesis, and further research maybe necessary with additional samples. More experienced auditors tend to deliver higher audit quality. I also control the regressions for size, debt and affiliation of the auditor. Even without considerable statistical significance, I find that auditors member from BIG4 tend to deliver higher audit quality.