پاسخگویی عمومی مؤسسات حسابرسی: واکاوی دیدگاه حسابرسان (مقاله علمی وزارت علوم)
درجه علمی: نشریه علمی (وزارت علوم)
آرشیو
چکیده
هدف پژوهش حاضر، بررسی و استخراج دیدگاه حسابرسان درباره پیشران ها و پسران های پیش روی مؤسسات حسابرسی در پاسخگویی به ذینفعان گزارش های حسابرسی است. پژوهش حاضر با استفاده از رویکرد تحلیلتم انجام شده است. شرکای مؤسسات حسابرسی مشارکت کنندگان پژوهش حاضر بودند که به روش گلوله برفی انتخاب شدند. داده ها ازطریق مصاحبه نیمه ساختاریافته با خبرگان جمع آوری شدند و تا زمان دستیابی به اشباع نظری ادامه یافت. در پژوهش حاضر، پس از انجام 17 مصاحبه، اشباع نظری محرز شد. نتایج حاصل از پژوهش نشان می دهند از دیدگاه خبرگان، شاخصه های انجمن های حرفه ای فعال، جایگاه اجتماعی حسابرسان، تمایل به هم ریختی با صنعت، علامت دهی، روحیه ریسک پذیری، پاسخ خواهی ذینفعان، بستر قانونی، عوامل ساختاری و کمیته حسابرسی فعال به عنوان پیشران های پاسخگویی و شاخص های طرح دعاوی حقوقی، ارتقای انتظارات ذینفعان، منابع مالی ناکافی، نشت اطلاعاتی، کیفیت حسابرسی و ناهمگونی ادراکات نهادهای ناظر به عنوان پسران های ایجاد شفافیت و پاسخگویی به ذینفعان گزارش های حسابرسی مطرح شدند. این پژوهش بینش ارزشمندی برای توسعه مبانی نظری پاسخگویی به ذینفعان در مؤسسات حسابرسی فراهم می کند. این موضوع می تواند به حرفه حسابرسی و تدوین کنندگان استانداردها برای بهبود بستر قانونی برای تقویت نظارت در مؤسسات حسابرسی آنها کمک کند.Public Accountability in Audit Firms: Exploring Auditors' Perspectives
This study delves into auditors' perspectives regarding the catalysts and barriers that impact audit firms' responsiveness to users' needs for audited financial statements. The research adopts a thematic analysis approach, with the participants being partners from audit firms selected through snowball sampling. Data collection was carried out via semi-structured interviews and continued until reaching theoretical saturation. The point of theoretical saturation was reached after conducting 17 interviews. The findings of this study highlight nine factors that foster accountability within audit firms: active engagement of professional associations, the societal position of auditors, mimetic isomorphism, signaling mechanisms, a culture of embracing risk, stakeholder demand for accountability, a suitable legal foundation, structural factors, and proactive audit committee. Conversely, the study discovers six challenges that hinder the establishment of transparency and accountability in audit firms: legal claims, expanding expectations of stakeholders, insufficient financial resources, information leakage, audit quality, and differing perspectives from supervisory bodies. This research offers valuable insights contributing to the theoretical underpinning of accountability for stakeholders within audit firms. This can potentially assist the audit profession and standards-setting bodies in enhancing the legal framework to fortify oversight mechanisms.
Introduction
Auditors hold a pivotal role in furnishing transparent information to the market, and the extent of their internal transparency profoundly impacts the perception of those who benefit from the audited reports. A lack of insight into how professional activities are conducted on their behalf can potentially impede the transparency cycle in financial reporting, posing challenges for stakeholders. When the audit process remains opaque and devoid of conveying internal operations to stakeholders, it can result in a misguided evaluation of audit quality.
Disseminating information to users of audited financial statements who lack familiarity with the audit process can
influence their judgments on audit quality. While professional bodies overseeing auditing in various countries addressed public accountability of audit firms and initiated legislative measures in 2008, this matter has not yet been addressed in Iran. Despite the Iranian Association of Certified Public Accountants evaluating firms' statuses, overseeing audit quality, and classifying audit firms accordingly, stakeholders remain unaware of the rationales and intricacies behind the quality control ratings of each firm.
Stakeholders require transparency in the audit process, followed by an assessment of audit quality to gauge the quality of financial reporting. Regulatory authorities should establish an appropriate platform to fulfill this valid requirement. The initial stride in this endeavor involves dissecting and elucidating the factors that induce audit firms to be accountable to their stakeholders. Subsequently, audit firms' impediments in upholding accountability must be scrutinized to diminish or mitigate them, allowing regulatory bodies to guide audit firms towards greater accountability.
Research Methods
The current research has a fundamental purpose, and the data analysis method used was the theme analysis approach. Firstly, an initial framework was created by studying specialized texts on the research topic. Interviews were conducted with audit experts selected through the snowball approach to enrich the collected concepts within the scope of the extracted concepts. The interview process continued until theoretical saturation was reached after completing the fourteenth interview. However, the interview was extended to the seventeenth interview to ensure saturation. Two approaches were used to ensure reliability: test-retest reliability and reliability between two coders.
Findings and Conclusions
According to experts, several factors were identified as drivers of audit firms toward accountability to stakeholders. These factors include active engagement of professional associations, the social position of auditors from stakeholders' perspective, memetic isomorphism, signaling to stakeholders, a culture of embracing risk, accountability demand of stakeholders, a suitable legal foundation, structural factors, and a proactive audit committee. However, although many professional associations govern the audit profession in Iran, they have not performed any specific activities in this area to create a desire for audit firms to move toward accountability. Additionally, auditors do not have a good position from the point of view of stakeholders, and auditing is primarily done to comply with legal requirements rather than create credibility for financial statements.
Experts also mentioned that audit firms tend to copy other firms' behavior, and if an audit firm discloses internal information, others will follow. On the other hand, factors such as legal claims, expanding expectations of stakeholders, insufficient financial resources, information leakage, audit quality, and differences in perspectives of supervisory bodies were identified as hindrances to audit firms responding to stakeholders.
In the current situation, the lack of filing lawsuits against auditors is attributed to the lack of knowledge about the professional functioning of auditors. Creating awareness in this field for stakeholders in case of non-alignment with the improvement of audit quality may provide the basis for filing lawsuits against auditors in the future.
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