EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Measuring audit quality of local governments in England and Wales

Gary Giroux and Rowan Jones

Research in Accounting Regulation, 2011, vol. 23, issue 1, 60-66

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to model and test the audit quality provided to local governments in England and Wales. A key question is: are there major differences in audit quality provided? The Audit Commission, a national public body under Parliament, regulates the audits. It sets audit standards, appoints the auditors, and (although each auditor and client local government set the specific audit fee for that client) it establishes a formula to determine standard audit fees. The Audit Commission also conducts an annual review of the audit quality provided by the selected auditors, as well as a survey of client satisfaction. The majority of audits are conducted by District Auditors (public sector employees of the Audit Commission). About a quarter of local governments are audited by one of six private sector auditors (including three of the Big 4). Actual results indicate that audit quality differences are associated with the number of governmental audit clients and local government type. Generally, there were modest quality differences by auditor category.

Keywords: Audit quality; Audit Commission; Local governments; Audit regulation; Client satisfaction (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1052045711000038
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:reacre:v:23:y:2011:i:1:p:60-66

DOI: 10.1016/j.racreg.2011.03.002

Access Statistics for this article

Research in Accounting Regulation is currently edited by G. Previts

More articles in Research in Accounting Regulation from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:reacre:v:23:y:2011:i:1:p:60-66