As a result of legal and regulatory requirements, audit firms in certain
jurisdictions have recently started issuing transparency reports containing information on
audit firm governance. In this study we investigate whether audit firm governance
disclosure is associated with actual audit quality. Based on a sample of transparency
reports of 103 audit firms in a number of EU countries, we find that there is variation in
the extent and type of governance disclosures across audit firms. We, however, do not
find an association with actual audit quality, apart from a weak association with an audit
firm’s statement on the effectiveness of its internal quality control system.