Conclusion
Using Miles and Snow’s (1978, 2003) strategy typology, we provide a measure of business strategy that requires only publicly available information and is generalizable across industries. Using this measure, we first investigate whether companies’ business strategies exhibit differences in the occurrence of financial reporting irregularities. We find that companies following a prospector strategy are more likely than companies following a defender strategy to experience financial reporting irregularities across three samples of irregularities: SEC AAERs, shareholder lawsuits related to alleged accounting improprieties, and accounting restatements. Based on additional analysis, we provide evidence that the business strategy measure represents client business risk and is not a substitute for financial reporting risk.
Next, we explore whether clients’ business strategies represent an underlying determinant of audit effort levels because of differences in the client business risk of the strategies. We find that clients following a prospector strategy have higher audit fees, suggesting that auditors expend greater audit effort for these clients compared to defenders. Even after controlling for standard measures of client size, risk, and complexity, we find that our business strategy measure is significant in an audit fee model. In additional analyses we provide evidence that business strategy provides incremental explanatory power over measures suggested by prior literature as determinants of audit fees.
We consider several alternative explanations for why prospectors experience irregularities despite the apparent increase in auditor effort and conclude that lower audit quality does not explain our results. Instead, our findings suggest despite the higher audit fees (and higher audit effort) for prospectors, fees are not high enough to account for the riskiness of these clients. Alternatively, there may be nothing auditors can do to further reduce this risk with current audit technology. Future research should explore how to improve audits of prospector clients.
Finally, we deconstruct the business strategy measure into its individual components in our audit fee and financial reporting irregularities models and find that the individual measures either do not load significantly or load with opposite signs. In addition, we replace our STRATEGY measure with factor loadings and obtain similar results. Thus, it appears that using organizational strategy typology to combine these measures captures a unique construct that is “greater than the sum of its parts”.
Our research is subject to several limitations. Although we rely on Miles and Snow’s (1978, 2003) strategy typology to create our STRATEGY measure, we assess business strategy with noise. To the extent that measurement error could lead to misclassifying some firms’ business strategies, this is a limitation of our study. Another limitation is our inability to determine precisely why prospector firms experience more financial reporting irregularities in spite of greater audit effort. While we explored several potential explanations for these apparently paradoxical findings, additional research is needed to investigate these findings further. Finally, as noted previously, our results regarding financial reporting irregularities should be interpreted carefully as these irregularities (e.g., AAERs, accounting-related lawsuits, and restatements) are relatively infrequent events.
We make several contributions to the existing accounting literatures on financial reporting irregularities and audit effort. First, we provide evidence that differences in the client business risk of companies’ choice of business strategies is an underlying determinant of the likelihood of financial reporting irregularities and thus is a determinant of financial statement quality. Second, our results based on an audit fee model provide evidence that auditors appear to recognize and adjust audit effort based on client business strategies, which is a broader, more comprehensive business risk approach in assessing their audit clients. Business strategy represents features of client business risk beyond what has been represented in the literature using traditional individual proxies for client size, risk, and complexity. Finally, we construct a comprehensive, theory-based business strategy measure that is replicable using publicly available data. This is important because prior measures have required access to management and/or proprietary data. Our study provides evidence that is potentially useful to auditors, regulators, investors, and analysts because it identifies organizational business strategies as an important determinant of both financial reporting irregularities and audit effort.