Auditor switching in an enterprise group and opinion shopping

Abstract

Opinion shopping has attracted extensive researches in accounting. There have been the changes of auditors to achieve the improvement of audit opinion or opinion shopping in practice. Regulators are also highly concerned about audit opinion shopping. However, the results of empirical researches have not yielded a consistent conclusion. The conventional wisdom in the literature focused on the single public company to study audit switching and opinion shopping. In emerging markets, the business group is the main form of organizations. This paper regards business group as a whole entity to analyze the impact of audit switching on audit opinion. We find that auditors will lose more than one client within a business group if they issue modified opinion to a listed company in the business group. Accounting firm that takes over group business for the first time is easier to cater to the group firm to achieve opinion shopping. And the audit opinion can be improved if the business group switches the auditor. These findings imply that the business group successfully engages in opinion shopping.