Audit risk and corporate governance: Italian auditors perception after the global financial crisis

Abstract

This paper aims at analysing the most relevant factors for auditors when they estimate audit risk of their client company, and charge the client for it. We did so, by asking partners of audit firms to rate their agreement on the relevance of a set of audit risk factors drawn from the literature. In order to investigate further, we analysed results after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, for new client firms. We ended up with a dynamic analysis of the factors auditors pay attention to when auditing a company’s financial statement, by including the effect of a financial crisis in the auditing model. Therefore, this paper contributes to the auditing and corporate governance literature, by identifying those factors such as, among others, sector, effectiveness of internal control procedures and auditor’s experience, which are considered as relevant in assessing the components of audit risk, as well as by highlighting the role of corporate governance as perceived by auditors in the estimation of the audit risk in the client-acceptance decision. Key words: Corporate governance, auditors, audit firms, audit risk, global financial crisis.