Audit quality and partner characteristics Partner characteristics and their impact on audit quality for the telecommunications industry in Norway
Abstract
This study investigates the effect of audit partner characteristics (gender, experience, and expertise) on audit quality for audit clients in the telecommunications industry in Norway. We use two different models as our proxy for audit quality, abnormal accruals in line with Francis & Wang (2008) and abnormal accruals according to the Kothari et al. (2005). The data is collected from Proff Forvalt (proff.no), and manually from the annual accounts from Brønnøysundregistrene (brreg.no) and Finanstilsynets virksomhetsregister (finanstilsynet.no/virksomhetsregister). The sample consists of the annual accounts of 182 Norwegian companies in the telecommunications industry, and the analysis is for the financial year 2021.
We find that for our sample, only partner experience is significant where an auditor with above average experience has larger abnormal accruals, and therefore has a lower audit quality. The results for partner gender and partner expertise are insignificant in both audit quality models.