Auditor Association with Quarterly Financial Information: An Empirical Test
实证检验用户能否区分审计师对季度财务信息提供的不同保证程度，发现用户可能无法区分，这对审计师扩展服务范围有重要启示。
Recently, recommendations have been made that the traditional role of CPAs be expanded to include association with additional types of information and to include association short of full audits for financial information of interim periods (e.g., American Accounting Association's Committee on Basic Auditing Concepts [1972], Carmichael [1974], and American Institute of Certified Public Accountants' (AICPA) Commission on Auditors' Responsibilities [1978]). The public accounting profession has responded with new forms of auditor association with quarterly financial information (AICPA [1975; 1976; 1979]) and with financial forecasts (AICPA [1980]). These new forms of auditor association call for procedures which are more limited than those performed for traditional audits. For this reason we might expect reports issued with these varying forms of auditor association to provide less assurance than do regular audit reports. While auditors are well aware of the limits of less than full audit procedures, it is not known whether users of financial information discern such limits. Carmichael [1974, p. 69] suggests that: Doubts about the ability of users to distinguish among different forms of assurance have slowed acceptance by auditors of the concept of levels of assurance. Many fear that users might not recognize the distinctions and would assume that the auditor was accepting the same degree of responsibility as he does for audited annual financial statements. The SEC [1975, p. 357] noted, but rejected, the notion that investors would be unable to distinguish appropriately between different types of reports.