Qualidade da informação

: a qualidade de auditoria no contexto português

Abstract

The present dissertation seeks to understand the quality of auditing in the surrounding of the Portuguese reality, based on some constraints that may influence the quality of its work. Financial markets are not very receptive regarding the quality of the information provided by companies, which may be the result of successive corporate scandals; hence, the job of an auditor, developed by an external, autonomous, and independent from the auditor, entity, displays an increasingly important role to augment the trust of those agents who are potentially interested in the company report. However, the efficiency of the world developed by the auditor is sometimes doomed, hence arising the necessity of understanding the objective of this investigation. Legal, contractual and self-interest incentives are the main stimulus for the distortion of the company financial conditions’ true reality. In this study, it was regressed a model for the variations of the company’s accruals as a proxy of a measure of the level of results’ manipulation influenced by managers, based on McNichols (2002) model. In this study, it is assumed that a company with lower levels of manipulation has a better audit quality. Thus, using the manipulation of results as proxy, we estimated a model that allows to test audit quality. This model enables to understand how audit quality can be influenced by the auditor company’s dimension, the year in which the auditor was replaced and, finally, the time of the auditor in the same company. There are some company’s characteristics taken into consideration, such as its dimension, its tangibility, its leverage and its profitability. This investigation focuses only in little and medium companies since Portuguese companies are mainly non-public ones, where public information is usually less than public ones. Empirical evidence shows that bigger auditor companies (Big 4) have lower auditor quality. However, for bigger, more leverage and with negative earnings companies, this lower audit quality is less pronounced. Finally, it allowed to conclude that, the longer the time an auditor is with the same company, the higher the quality of the work developed. Additionally, in replacement years, the quality of the work developed by the auditor increases.

Date of Award	10 Jul 2017
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Paulo Alves (Supervisor) & Ricardo Cunha (Co-Supervisor)