Abstract ABSTRACT: This study is based on a survey of the annual reports from 1972 to 1975 for the population of publicly held companies with more than 15 million in assets (approximately 3400 companies). The authors present evidence which supports the following three hypotheses for this population. First, systematic security risk for a company is a useful surrogate for that aspect of "audit risk" which relates to the likelihood that the company will receive a qualified audit opinion. Second, this aspect of "audit risk" is not distributed uniformly across the major auditing firms. Third, when the differences in this aspect of "audit risk" are considered, comparability does exist across the Big Eight CPA firms in the incidence of qualified audit options.
Shank et al. (Sun,) studied this question.