FACTORS IMPACTING AUDIT QUALITY: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

Abstract

In the face of the international economic markets continuous evolution, companies face heightened risks. This has led to the development of financial auditing services aiming to preserve the interests of financial information users. Subsequently has emerged the importance to assess, supervise and improve the quality of the audits. Despite this, some factors may have an impact on the quality of the audit, which makes it necessary to conduct a careful study about an actual situation of this topic. The objective of this article is to realize a systematic literature review of a selection of articles, adopting a new methodology in this subject, based on the descending ranking of their publishing journals Impact Factor (SSCI) 2021 in Business & Finance field. This study has identified 48 factors that may influence the quality of audits, defined the unclear ones and classified them into three categories, namely auditor-related factors, client-related factors, and market-related factors. However, our results indicate that the characteristics of the client warrant the most attention, accounting for 44% of our analysis. The results also shows an overview of the statistical methodologies employed in the analyzed articles, most used audit quality proxies, types of encountered limits by their authors and their proposed suggestions for future research. These results obtained might be of interest for legislators, authorities, researchers and professionals in order to clarify a global image about audit quality determinants and contribute to facilitate future actions concerning the quest of mastering the audit quality.