Audit quality and the going-concern decision-making process: Spanish evidence

Emiliano Ruiz-Barbadillo, Nieves Gomez-Aguilar, Cristina De Fuentes-Barbera and Maria Antonia Garcia-Benau

European Accounting Review, 2004, vol. 13, issue 4, 597-620

Abstract: In this study, we attempt empirically to investigate the relationship between audit quality and the probability that a financially distressed company would receive a going-concern opinion. Auditor decision-making in the presence of going-concern uncertainties may be characterized as a two-stage process. The first stage is the identification of a potential going-concern problem and the second stage is to determine whether the particular company should receive a qualified going-concern opinion. A sample of 1,199 non-financial Spanish company-years has been obtained from the database issued by the Stock Exchange National Commission for the fiscal years ending between December 1991 and December 2000. The results indicate that audit quality (measured by the auditor's level of independence and knowledge) affects the probability that a financially distressed company would receive a going-concern opinion. This probability is influenced not only by the auditor's ability to detect financial uncertainties, but also by the auditor's decision-making as to what type of opinion should be finally issued.

Date: 2004
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0963818042000216820 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:euract:v:13:y:2004:i:4:p:597-620

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/REAR20

DOI: 10.1080/0963818042000216820

Access Statistics for this article

European Accounting Review is currently edited by Laurence van Lent

More articles in European Accounting Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().