Overview of Surrogates to Measure Audit Quality

After the collapse of Arthur Andersen in 2002, the auditing profession has faced increasing pressure from external parties to enhance and improve audit quality. These pressures led to a continued need to study the factors that affect audit quality. Until present, there is no agreement among researchers about the definition and factors of audit quality. To date, the issue of how audit quality is measured remains a matter of controversy and disagreement. Previous studies used alternatives to measure audit quality. This paper reviews both the arguments for and against for these studies. Although, the importance of these alternatives and its potential contribution on audit quality have been emphasized, they are not a justification to ignore audit characteristics that could have significant impact on audit quality. This paper contributes to audit literature and represents a brief overview of reviews both the arguments for and against of using audit quality alternatives in previous studies over the past 30 years. Thus it provides a basis for discussing several potentially rich factors for future research on audit quality