Auditor Responses to and Prevention of Non-Income-Increasing Misreporting: Evidence from Audit Fees and Restatements

Abstract

We document that non-income-increasing (NII) misreporting is important to investors and then investigate whether auditors respond to and prevent different types of NII misstatements. We categorize NII misstatements into those whose correction adversely (i.e., unfavorably) affect financial reports and those whose correction positively (i.e., favorably) affect financial reports. We find that audit fees are positively associated with unfavorable NII misstatements, but not with favorable NII misstatements. We examine whether auditors prevent quarterly misstatements from resulting in annual report misstatements and find that auditors are less likely to prevent both favorable and unfavorable NII quarterly report misstatements from resulting in annual report misstatements, with the audit efficacy being lower for favorable NII misstatements. In sum, our research indicates that auditors do attempt to constrain NII misreporting with greater effort expended on unfavorable NII misstatements. Data Availability: Data used in this study are available from public sources. JEL Classifications: M49.