Client Concentration and Audit Fees -- An Empirical Study based on China's Listed Manufacturing Companies

Yan Wang

《Frontiers in Economics and Management》 3卷8期 (2022/08) Pp. 543-550

https://doi.org/10.6981/FEM.202208_3(8).0075

摘要

Customers are the fundamental source of corporate profit, a key chain that every company cannot ignore for survival and development, and have a very important role in all aspects of production and operation. In the risk assessment part of the audit, CPAs are required to understand the audited entity and its environment, which also includes customer relationships and customer characteristics. It can be seen that the concentration of customers of listed companies is the content that requires CPAs to conduct key audits. At the current stage, there is no consistent fee standard in the audit market, so the paper examines the impact on CPA firms in determining audit fees from the client's perspective. This paper reviews some existing research results, applies the theory of modern risk-oriented auditing, the theory of supply chain integration, and analyzes the impact of client concentration on audit fees of listed companies by using the data of A-share manufacturing companies listed in China from 2015 to 2020, and proposes research hypotheses and constructs regression models to test the correlation between the two. According to the empirical results, it is indicated that there is a significant negative correlation between client concentration and audit fees, i.e., the higher the concentration of clients of listed companies, the lower the audit fees of CPAs. This indicates that the concentration of large clients is indispensable for the integration of supply chain in China. Based on the results of the empirical test, the paper proposes corresponding countermeasures from both CPAs and listed companies.

關鍵字

Audit Fees ； Customer ； Concentration Characteristics ； Supply Chain Integration

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