Audit tenure and audit quality: The renewal sense of comfort?

Abstract

This study is aimed at providing empirical evidence on the association between audit tenure and audit quality to support the argument of the enactment of regulation on audit rotation in Indonesia. Using the theory of comfort perspective, this study focused on the person-to-person relationship; that is the relationship between partners of the public auditing firm and the client firm’s CEO; as well as on the relations at the firm level. Panel regression is employed to study the association of audit tenure and audit quality. The results revealed the fact that the audit partner and CEO tenure measured by the years of the audit contract has a negative association with audit quality proxied by discretionary accruals. Furthermore, the tenure of the public auditing firm and the client’s firm had a moderately significant positive impact on companies’ audit quality. The results imply that the regulation of audit partner rotation is needed to renew the sense of comfort in terms of maintaining high audit quality.