Audit quality and engagement partner busyness: The role of internal resource allocation
研究发现项目合伙人的工作量会降低审计质量，但内部资源（如高级人员可用性和客户特定信息）能缓解这种负面影响，且对非四大客户影响更显著。
Abstract Prior studies have found that engagement partner busyness influences audit effectiveness. The more workload partners have from clients, the busier partners will be, resulting in lower audit quality. However, internal resources available to partners can attenuate the partners’ work burden, although the moderating effect of such resources has been mostly overlooked in the literature. As partners’ work burden could lessen for a partner with more internal resources, we elaborate on its effect in this study. We examine the following types of internal resources: (1) availability of higher‐ranked personnel and (2) accumulated client‐specific information. Our results show that engagement partners reduce audit quality for a client when partners bear higher work burden from other clients, for which limited internal resources are available. Moreover, the results indicate that this mutual impact on the audit quality of partners’ workload and internal resource availability for other clients is more pronounced for non‐Big 4 clients. These results suggest that internal resource allocation is critical for quality control, especially for non‐Big 4 audit firms.