감사인 지정에 대한 시장반응 (Market Responses to Mandatory Auditor Designation)

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 한국회계학회
· 수록지 정보 : 회계학연구 / 34권 / 1호 / 207 ~ 240페이지
· 저자명 : 이세용, 정형록, 노밝은

초록

감사인 지정제도는 자율적인 감사시장에 규제기관이 개입하는 우리나라의 특수한 제도로서 우리나라 선행연구들은 주로 재량적 발생액을 이용하여 감사인 지정제도의 효과를 분석해 왔다. 그러나 재량적 발생액은 기본적으로 측정 오차의 문제와 회계정보의 이용자 입장에서 감사인 지정제도에 대한 평가를 반영하고 있지 못하다는 문제점을 가지고 있다. 이에 따라 본 연구에서는 선행연구에 더하여 감사인 지정에 대한 시장반응을 검증하였다.

논문접수: 2008. 1 게재확정: 2009. 2
*이 논문은 2007년 정부(교육인적자원부)의 재원으로 한국학술진흥재단의 지원을 받아 수행된 연구임
(KRF-2007-332-B00217)
**가톨릭대학교 경영학부 부교수 Associate Professor, School of Business Administration, The Catholic University of Korea(E-mail: [e-mail])
***경희대학교 회계․세무학부 조교수 Assistant Professor, School of Management, Kyung Hee University(E-mail: [e-mail])[연구비 수혜시 소속: 가톨릭대학교 경영학부 전임강사 Full- time Lecturer, School of Business Administration, The Catholic University of Korea]
****가톨릭대학교 대학원 경영학과 박사과정 Doctoral Student, School of Business Administration, The Catholic University of Korea(E-mail: [e-mail])

이를 위해 본 연구는 1994년부터 2002년까지 유가증권시장에 상장된 12월 결산 제조업 중에서 증권선물위원회에서 감사인 지정을 최초로 받은 179개 기업을 표본으로 분석을 수행하였다. 분석 결과, 감사인 지정일을 기준으로 전후 일정기간의 누적초과주식수익률은 유의적인 양의 값을 갖는 것으로 나타났으며, 감사인 지정기업과 유사한 기업특성을 갖는 대응 표본을 구성하여 누적초과주식수익률을 비교한 경우에도 감사인 지정기업의 누적초과주가수익률이 대응기업의 누적초과주식수익률 보다 높은 것으로 나타났다. 추가적으로 수익률-이익 모형을 이용하여 감사인 지정에 대한 시장의 인식을 분석한 결과 대응기업의 이익반응계수는 특정한 추세를 보이지 않지만, 감사인 지정기업의 이익반응계수는 감사인 지정 전의 기간에는 지속적으로 감소하다가 감사인 지정년도를 지나면서 지속적으로 증가하는 모습을 보이고 있어 장기적인 관점에서 볼 때에도 시장은 감사인 지정에 대해 긍정적인 반응을 보이고 있는 것으로 나타났다.

영어초록

The term “Mandatory Auditor Designation” refers to a exceptional regulation, in Korea, through which a regulation authority, SFC(Securities & Futures Commission), intervenes in the audit market, by designating auditors mandatorily to certain firms, so that the firms can provide reliable accounting information to market participants. For example, auditors have been assigned mandatorily to the firms with higher disparity between ownership and management, high level of debt ratio, and excess of loans, etc.
However, since audit committee was introduced to monitor audit process in 1999, mandatory auditor designation by SFC is not applied to firms whose audit committee designates auditors to the firms. In addition, it is possible that SFC can designates auditors mandatorily to firms again unless the causes of mandatory auditor designation have not been resolved for three years after the first mandatory auditor designation.
Thus, SFC is believed to expect that the reliability of accounting information could be increased with the regulation of mandatory accounting designation, which implies that mandatory auditor designation can be a way to protect accounting information from being decreased driven by FAES(Free Audit Engagement System). Therefore, by checking whether mandatory auditor designation has made substantially effective, this paper provides both market participants and a regulation authority with important implications as to the validity of SFC’s intervention in free audit market, with regard to the reliability of accounting information and independence of auditors.
Prior studies have examined the effectiveness of mandatory auditor designation by analyzing the change in discretionary accruals, and showed that auditors are able to keep their independence from firms and discretionary accruals has decreased after mandatory auditor designation(Park 1996; Kwon et al .2004; Ahn et al. 2004; Park et al. 2005).
However, there are fundamental limitations in their conclusions that accounting information quality has been improved, if the conclusion has been extracted from analyzing decreases in discretionary accruals. This is because discretionary accruals have two problematic properties. The first is that we cannot always treat discretionary accruals as opportunistic, considering its positive role of signalling managers’ private information to the market(Subramanyam, 1996). The second is that discretionary accruals are far from measurement errors. In addition to the above-mentioned problematic properties of discretionary accruals, discretionary accruals, themselves, do not show directly how the information users react to the regulation of mandatory auditor designation. Considering that the purpose of financial reporting is to provide market participants with reliable information, the effectiveness of mandatory auditor designation should be verified by checking whether the market investors perceive the improvement in reliability of the accounting information by mandatory auditor designation.
Therefore, unlike the prior studies, our paper investigates the effects of the mandatory auditor designation using market responses to it. According to prior studies in Korea, the independence of mandatorily designated auditors are expected to be increased. From this point, we expect that the increased independence will make earnings quality higher for the mandatory auditor designation firms, thereby leading to positive market responses to mandatory auditor designation. To do it, we analyze cumulated abnormal returns (hereafter, CARs) around the day of mandatory auditor designation. And the purpose of mandatory auditor designation by SFC is supposed to improve the quality of accounting information, not only in the short window but also in the long window. So, we examine the long-term effect of mandatory auditor designation, in addition. To do it, we analyze the earnings response coefficients(hereafter, ERCs) from the returns-earnings model.
For the period from 1994 through 2002, we obtain 179 firm-years where auditors are firstly and mandatorily designated by SFC. The results are as follows. First, the analysis of the market response reveals that significantly positive CARs are observed during a certain days around the day when auditors are firstly and mandatorily designated. For the robustness of our analysis, we collect matching samples whose firm-characteristics is similar to those of the designated firms. Naturally, the auditors of matching firms are not designated auditors. Comparing the mandatory auditor designation firms with the matching firms, we observe that CARs of the mandatory auditor designation firms are higher than CARs of the matching firms.
Second, for the mandatory auditor designation firms, ERCs steadily increase after the mandatory auditor designation year, while ERCs continuously decrease before the designation year. However, we could not find any noticeable trends in ERCs for the matching firms. This discrepancy implies that the market also positively responses to the mandatory auditor designation even for a long-term period. Therefore, our findings reinforce the results of prior studies by showing positive effects of the mandatory auditor designation.
However, because our paper focuses only on the firms whose auditors are firstly and mandatorily designated by SFC, we cannot trace the firms that are designated again after the first designation year. In addition, according to the previous literature, discretionary accruals has changed differentially according to the causes of mandatory auditor designation. In our paper, we do not consider the possibility of differential market responses to the different mandatory auditor designation causes. Both the market responses to the firms with repeatedly designated auditors and the differential responses to the differential causes of mandatory auditor designation remain topics for future research.

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