Revisorns oberoende : En studie av faktorers påverkan på revisorers oberoende i revisionsuppdrag.

An auditor is hired by a company with the commission to assure the audit quality of the financial reports that the company disclose to its stakeholders, such as banks, insurance companies or others who have an interest in this reports. If the auditors have not signaled about failures, the stakeholders expect that the reports are credible. Auditing is an important activity in society and the auditors' work should follow generally accepted auditing standards. Furthermore, the financial statements should give a true and fair view of the company’s position, as these statements are the foundation for the stakeholders’ decision-making. Therefore, the auditor’s independence is vital. The purpose of this study is to describe and analyze four factors that can challenge auditors’ independence; self-review by the Swedish analysis model, the audit tenure, non-audit services and the client importance. At the beginning of the 21st century, several accounting scandals were discovered where auditors failed in their independence. The fact that accounting scandals occur, even though the need for auditor independence is essential, makes this subject interesting to study. The study is based on legitimacy theory and principal-agent theory and to study whether the auditors consider that the four factors do affect their independence, we conducted a quantitative and qualitative survey. The quantitative survey was answered of 119 auditors through a web-based survey, and the qualitative survey was done by three interviews. The quantitative survey is analyzed with the statistical program IBM SPSS to examine possible connections between the four factors and how important the auditors consider their independence. The empirical data were analyzed by descriptive statistics, rotating exploratory factor analysis, correlation analysis, and regression analysis. To examine the demographic variables a one-way ANOVA have been performed.The results show that there is a correlation between two of the four factors that can affect the auditors’ independence. The auditor's audit tenure indicates that a longer audit tenure with the same client tends to affect the auditor independence. The independence perceived as less important, the longer the audit tenure is. The second factor indicates that the auditor's self-review through analysis model affect the auditor's independence, due to the self-review is subjective and therefore can challenge the auditor's independence. Furthermore, the results show that there are moderate homogeneity of the auditors' standpoints regarding auditor independence.Validerat; 20160824 (global_studentproject_submitter