Toward Understanding Chinese Auditors' Structuring of Audit Approaches, Client Acceptance Decisions, Risk Assessment, and Stringency of Imposed Reporting Standards

This study seeks insights into determinants of Chinese audit firms' ability to ensure high quality financial reporting. Its scope of investigation encompasses the extent to which Chinese audit firms employ structured audit processes, their evaluation of potential clients, factors that impact their risk assessment, and the stringency of the reporting standards that they seek to impose on clients. The factors investigated include ones suggested as being important by extant research, as well as unique characteristics of the Chinese setting (e.g., the importance of interpersonal relationships [“guanxi”] and most listed companies' origins as state-owned enterprises). Structured interviews and questionnaire surveys are used to solicit quantitative and open-ended responses from 102 Chinese auditors at the partner, manager, and senior levels of Big 4 affiliates and local public accounting firms.