The Relationship between Audit Quality and Fraud in Listed Companies in Tehran Stock Exchange

Abstract

The present study examines the relationship between audit quality and fraud in listed companies in Tehran Stock Exchange. The study tries to found that to what extent the annual adjustments and restatements of balance sheet figures and restatements of profit and loss figures, which are called fraud here, can mislead auditors and reduce the audit quality. Research up to now has been done on the basis of audit firm size and firm size. We sought to analyze these variables and come to conclusions according to previous research. The research sample consists of 122 companies in Tehran Stock Exchange in the period of 2007 to 2011. The research statistical model is logistic regression (stepwise). For this study, three hypotheses have been considered. Comparison of dependent variables averages indicate that the restatements rate of balance sheet figures, relative to the other dependent variables, is more. This means that restatement of balance sheet figures influences audit quality more than other dependent variables (fraud) and has an inverse relation with it. That is to say, the lower the value of these items, the higher is the quality of audit. Thus, audit quality cannot explain the fraud alone, so that after entering the control variables a significant relationship between fraud and audit quality can be found.