后安然审计报告的隐藏性标准：证据筛选外文翻译.docVIP

外文翻译 原文 Post-Enron implicit audit reporting standards: sifting through the evidence Material Source: Open Access publications from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Author: Marleen Willekenst, Heidi Vander Bauwhede and Piet Sercu When, after Enrons collapse (October-December 2001), the less than glamorous role played by Arthur Andersen gradually became evident, analysts and the press suddenly eyed audit reports much more critically. This meant a higher probability that audit failures, if any, might be detected. And when, a few months later, the unthinkable happened and a BIG5 auditor sank in a matter of months, in the minds of the profession the expected damage to the auditor if and when a failure is discovered was revised upwards by several notches. Some response to the resulting increase in auditors business risk was natural, under the circumstances. SarbanesOxley raised the explicit audit standards, by imposing new rules. We argue that auditors simultaneously raised their implicit audit standards-that is, they increased compliance with the existing explicit audit reporting standards, or lowered the materiality threshold. l The tell-tale sign of a rise of the implicit standards, everything else being the same, would be a higher incidence of non-clean audit opinions; and such a higher incidence is exactly what we observe, even after sifting out effects from increased risk and changing clienteles in the sample.In fact, the sifted evidence is in many ways stronger than the prima facie one. In the remainder of this paper we first discuss the auditors alternatives and the practical difficulties we face when measuring their response. We next describe the sample in greater detail, we estimate to what extent shifts in company risks have affected auditor behavior, and test whether there remains a residual schift that may be attributable to an Enron-Andersen effect. I.The prima facie evidence Toughening the implicit standards would surely have been a sensible response to th