چکیده:
Objective: Audit quality is a complex concept whose assessment depends on many latent factors. By providing information about them to stakeholders, the public accountability of audit firms contributes to assessing the quality of auditing and determining the extent to which they rely on audit reports. In this regard, this study examined the research in audit firm’s accountability to extract factors associating firm's accountability, the importance of which was determined by audit partners as experts. Methods: This research applied a mixed (a combination of qualitative and quantitative data) method with exploratory objective. In this study, 99 papers were analyzed, and 23 experts who selected through the snowball method, ranked the extracted factors. According to the participants’ opinion, the factors were prioritized using the quantitative Entropy-Shannon method. Results: Factors connecting to audit firm's accountability divided into three categories including motivating factors (nine categories), disincentive factors (three categories) and accountability dimensions (eight categories). Conclusion: The results show that the legal requirements for accountability, active professional associations, stakeholders demand for accountability, active audit committee, social importance of auditor's activities, partners ‘personal tendency for disclosure, information content of auditor's report, signal to stakeholders and professional ethics play role in audit firms’ accountability context. On the contrary, raising stakeholders’ expectations and disclosure costs are obstacles for audit firms to be accountable. Furthermore, information of the quality control system, the auditing technology, the ownership, the legal and governmental structure, the independence policies, the financial position and performance, professional training and international cooperation are important for the stakeholders of audit firm's accountability.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Furthermore, from the experts’ point of view, disclosure of information regarding the firm’s quality control system, technology used by auditors, ownership and legal structure of the firm, corporate governance system of firms, independence policies of the firm, financial situation and performance of the firm, continuous professional education of employees, and international collaborations of the firm are important for stakeholders’ accountability of accounting firms, respectively.
In this regard, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (2015) believes that there are numerous indicators for evaluating the professional performance of auditors; however, these indicators are better understood only when accompanied by qualitative interpretations of the internal situation of firms, which, in the current situation, due to the unknown nature of how accounting firms operate and the lack of information provided by firms to stakeholders, assessing audit quality for stakeholders using published information is not possible.
Signaling to Stakeholders: Accounting firms with positive performance are motivated to provide internal firm information to stakeholders, creating a basis for evaluating audit quality, in order to select an auditor from business owners and attract a larger share of the market by sending a positive signal (Zhao, Meng, He & Gao2, 2019).
Cheng, Lopin & Feng 3 (2017) state that large accounting firms do not provide all their internal information to stakeholders and only disclose positive aspects of their operations, such as a suitable internal situation, correct decision-making process, resources, and facilities, and avoid disclosing negative aspects such as providing unauthorized non-audit services and dependence on certain business owners.
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