IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hbs/wpaper/15-055.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Auditor Lobbying on Accounting Standards

Author

Listed:
  • Abigail M. Allen

    (Harvard Business School, Accounting and Management Unit)

  • Karthik Ramanna

    (Harvard Business School, Accounting and Management Unit)

  • Sugata Roychowdhury

    (Boston College)

Abstract

We examine how Big N auditors' changing incentives impact their comment-letter lobbying on U.S. GAAP over the first thirty-four years of the FASB (1973-2006). We examine the influence of auditors' lobbying incentives arising from three basic factors: managing expected litigation and regulatory costs; catering to clients' preferences for flexibility in GAAP; and being conceptually aligned with the FASB, particularly on the use of fair values in accounting. We find evidence that auditor lobbying is driven by prevailing standards of litigation and regulatory scrutiny and by support for fair-value accounting. But we find no evidence that catering to clients' preferences for flexibility in GAAP drives auditor lobbying. Broadly, our paper offers the first large-sample descriptive analysis of the role of Big N auditors in the accounting standard-setting process.

Suggested Citation

  • Abigail M. Allen & Karthik Ramanna & Sugata Roychowdhury, 2014. "Auditor Lobbying on Accounting Standards," Harvard Business School Working Papers 15-055, Harvard Business School.
    • Handle: RePEc:hbs:wpaper:15-055
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/pages/download.aspx?name=15-055.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Isabelle Fabioux, 2016. "Le processus de normalisation de l’audit : état de l’art et voies de recherches futures," Post-Print hal-01902563, HAL.
    2. Karen Handley & Elaine Evans & Sue Wright, 2020. "Understanding participation in accounting standard‐setting: the case of AASB ED 192 Revised Differential Reporting Framework," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 60(4), pages 3621-3645, December.
    3. Knechel, W. Robert & Park, Hyun Jong, 2022. "Audit firm political connections and PCAOB inspection reports," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 100(C).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Auditors; FASB; GAAP; lobbying;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • G18 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Government Policy and Regulation
    • M41 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Accounting - - - Accounting
    • M42 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Accounting - - - Auditing
    • M48 - Business Administration and Business Economics; Marketing; Accounting; Personnel Economics - - Accounting - - - Government Policy and Regulation

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hbs:wpaper:15-055. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: HBS (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/harbsus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.