THE INFLUENCE OF EXTRA-AUDIT SERVICES ON THE AUDITOR INDEPENDENCE: THE STAKEHOLDERS’ PERCEPTION

Abstract

The increase of size and complexity of organizations promoted the need of business consultancy and advisory, creating an opportunity for companies to expand the range of audit services. Thus, from the 90s, audit firms begin to offer a vast range of related services, directly or indirectly, to the audit, such as consultancy, tax and accounting consultancy, installation of computer systems, resource humans’ management and others.

Despite its evolution, this practice has been considered a major cause of frauds and financial scandals that occurred, especially in the USA, since it assumes that this decreases the Auditor independence.

Under this problematic, we performed an empirical study in order to verify the stakeholders’ perception in relation to influence of providing extra-audit service on Auditor independence. For this purpose, and since the study was performed in Spain, we applied a questionnaire to a sample of 220 Auditors registered in the Registro Oficial de Auditores de Cuentas, 75 professionals from audited companies  and 171 university teachers registered in the Asociación Española de Profesores Universitarios de Contabilidad. Corroborating the results of Canning and Gwilliam (1999) Hay, Knechel and Li (2006) and Joshi et al, (2007), we verified that all users consider the provision of these services influences negatively the Auditor independence. This finding may reduce confidence that stakeholders deposit in the Audit Report and, consequently, contribute to the capital markets inefficiency and the whole economy.