روند کم هزینه در هزینه های حسابرسی و تاثیر آن در کیفیت خدمات Low-cost trends in audit fees and their impact on service quality

1. Introduction The 2008 economic crisis has drastically reduced the number of large firms. In Spain, for example, the number of large firms fell from 36,763 in 2008 to 26,210 in 2015.1 This 28.7% reduction reflects the fact that many affected firms are no longer considered large. Such firms might not necessarily have had to close, but their sales income might have dropped below the 6,000,000 Euro threshold above which firms are considered large. Understandably, this reduction in the number of large firms has had a major negative impact on auditors. According to data from the Instituto de Contabilidad y Auditoría de Cuentas (ICAC), the Spanish equivalent of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) in the USA, audit firms experienced a 13.15% drop in the volume of audits performed between 2009 and 2015. The reason for this drop is that many firms are no longer obliged to audit their annual accounts as a result of the 2008 financial crisis. These reductions in both the number of large firms and the volume of audits have intensified the competition among audit firms, which has caused these firms to cut the price of audits to capture as large a share of the market as possible. The fall in audit fees has been so drastic that it is even reasonable to use the concept of low-cost to refer to current audit fees. This research explores whether the drop in the price of audits has affected the quality of these audits. This issue is important because a decline in the quality of auditing services not only harms auditors, but also negatively affects audited firms and, as a result, their image and prestige, ultimately damaging their market value and financial and asset structure. Note that the credibility of annual accounts depends on the auditor’s report, which is especially important among listed companies because these firms must convey a spotless image to investors. Fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was used in this study because it offers a causally complex perspective, addressing asymmetric relationships among observations, and because it enables analysis of a small number of cases (Fiss, 2007). In this study, the dataset consisted of data on 37 audited firms that were listed on the IBEX 35 between 2004 and 2015. These firms provide accessible, reliable data on auditor’s reports because these firms are regulated by the Comisión Nacional del Mercado de Valores (CNMV), the government agency responsible for the financial regulation of the Spanish securities markets. This paper makes a valuable contribution to the literature. Although numerous studies have examined audit fees (Alexeyeva & Svanström, 2015; Charrakh & Sharifi, 2016; Evans & Schwartz, 2014; Huang, Chang, & Chiou, 2016; Stewart, Kent, & Routledge, 2015), they have all focused on high fees. This study, in contrast, is one of the very few studies to examine low-cost audits (Kuo & Lee, 2016). This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents the literature review. Section 3 describes the fsQCA method and explains its suitability for this study. Section 4 discusses the results of the analysis. Finally, Section 5 presents the conclusions of the study.