Do assigned audit partners perform higher quality audits than self-selected auditors?
23 Mar 2026
10:30 -12:00
Times are shown in local time
Open to: All
Room W2.02 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Accounting seminar
Speaker: Professor Jan Bouwens, University of Cambridge
The Accounting subject group would like to invite you to their upcoming seminar by Jan Bouwens, Research Fellow, Cambridge Judge Business School.
About the seminar topic
Auditors are selected and paid for by the organisations they audit. Policymakers are concerned that this structure influences auditor independence which, in turn, impairs quality. Accordingly, policymakers consider whether audit quality is enhanced if the auditor is appointed by an external (independent) party.
We study the working of such a model in a natural setting for local subsidiary audits conducted by the big-4 as part of group audits, where audit partners are either assigned to the subsidiary through parent firm management or self-selected by the subsidiary.
Our evidence contradicts the assumed audit quality improvement idea. We find that audit partners assigned to subsidiaries receive less information from the auditee, issue fewer going concern opinions, identify fewer control deficiencies, identify and correct fewer misstatements, and are less likely to constrain earnings management compared to self-selected auditors.
Some preliminary evidence we collect suggests that assigned auditors produce lower audit quality through effort reduction.
Speaker bio
Jan teaches managerial accounting at Cambridge Judge Business School.
Early in his career Jan held positions as an accountant and as a teacher. He joined the board of directors of a large Dutch school (50,000 students). He currently is one of the managing directors of the Foundation for Auditing Research. He also serves at the board of the CPA programme at the University of Amsterdam.
Jan examines how accounting systems can help employees to make their decisions and to assure that employees make decisions that are conducive to the firm they work for; the information bank employees use to decide on loans; and how differing levels of targets over time affect the extent to which managers learn.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Emily Brown.