Impact Factors on the Audit Opinion – Case Study

Investors' strategic decisions are based on information reported in financial statements. In order to be valid, according to national and international accounting regulations, the reported financial information must be of quality, a fact that can also be ensured by the opinion expressed following the completion of a quality mission. The purpose of this paper is to present the importance of financial audit quality to users of financial information. Several factors influence the quality of the financial audit. They can be structured according to several criteria and were represented by auditor size, audit fees and their evolution, and auditor rotation. To validate the research hypothesis, the authors tested the correlation between these factors based on data collected from 81 audit reports of 17 companies listed on the Bucharest Stock Exchange, the main market, from 2016-2020. To test the probability of issuing an unchanged opinion depending on the determinants, the population was tested using logistic regression and correlation tests. The results show that there is a correlation between the various researched variables. However, of a different intensity depending on the chosen factor, the econometric model was statistically significant, and specific high odds ratios were observed with the auditor's fees variable. The quality of the audit was measured by variables that refer to the auditor's characteristics starting from public information, without considering the internal factors of each auditor.