Internal Control Opinion Shopping and Audit Market Competition
研究了审计客户能否成功购买清洁的内部控制审计意见，以及审计市场竞争是否助长了这种行为。结果发现客户确实能买到好意见，且主要发生在竞争激烈的审计市场。
ABSTRACT This study examines the extent to which audit clients successfully engage in internal control opinion shopping activities and whether audit market competition appears to facilitate those activities. Regulators have long been concerned about the impact of both audit market competition and opinion shopping on audit quality. We adopt the framework developed in Lennox (2000) to construct a proxy to measure the tendency that clients engage in internal control opinion shopping activities. Our empirical results suggest that clients are successful in shopping for clean internal control opinions. In addition, we find evidence that internal control opinion shopping occurs primarily in competitive audit markets. Finally, our results indicate that among auditor dismissal clients, opinion shopping is more likely to occur when dismissals are made relatively late during a reporting period and when audit market competition is high. Our findings have implications for the current policy debate regarding audit quality and audit market competition.