دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی شرح دلایل شکست در کسب و کار با استفاده از افشاگری های گزارش حسابرس - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the ability of audit report disclosures to explain the causes of business failure. Despite incremental interest in organizational failure, much of the existing literature has used accounting ratios to foresee why firms fail. We hypothesise that the audit report can also be employed for this purpose because it provides information regarding any material uncertainty relating to events that may warn users about possible causes of business default. Using a matched sample of 808 failed and non-failed firms, our results suggest that audit report disclosures significantly explain the causes of business failure. Moreover, these findings are consistent with the results of studies that integrate both deterministic and voluntaristic perspectives into the examination of the antecedents of organizational failure, as disclosures about both external and internal factors are mentioned in the audit report and contribute to assessing default. Managers, auditors, regulators and other users may consider the audit report to be useful as a tool to anticipate business failure.

Conclusion

The aim of this paper is to analyse the explanatory power of disclosures in the audit report when identifying causes of business failure. We proxy failure by the beginning of insolvency court proceedings. Then, the audit report of the year prior to failure is examined, codified and used to identify the causes of failure to distinguish between failed and non-failed firms. We use an ad-hoc matched sample of 404 failed and 404 non-failed Spanish audited firms, and we apply different parametric (logit) and non-parametric (artificial intelligence) methodologies to build several estimation models. Our results are consistent among the different methods applied and suggest that the causes of business failure mentioned by auditors as comments in the audit report have approximately 80% accuracy when explaining the event of failure. Additionally, our evidence indicates that disclosures that mention causes related to a combination of both internal and external factors of this event contribute to explain business failure. This evidence agrees with proponents of integrating exogenous and endogenous factors to offer a more complete explanation of the causes of business failure (Amankwah-Amoah, 2016).