Audit regulation in an international setting: Testing the impact of religion, culture, market factors, and legal code on national regulatory efforts

Assuring the quality of international auditing is important in the current, globalized business/economic environment. High-quality international auditing efforts promote greater confidence in financial statements, and therefore promote greater movement of capital. Ensuring high-quality auditing efforts is the task of auditing regulation efforts, among others. Several potential determinants of the strength of these efforts were postulated in Kleinman et al (2014). The postulated determinants of interest include national culture, religion, legal code origin, and financial market liquidity. The authors, however, did not test the relationship of the postulated determinants to auditing enforcement efforts. This study undertakes the task of investigating such relationship empirically, using the Brown et al (2014) measures of auditing enforcement efforts. We find that comparative religious affiliation, religion’s importance, culture, legal code, and the financial variable of market liquidity were determinants of auditing enforcement efforts. The implications of these findings are presented.