The discursives factors of the audit quality of statutory audit: Case of the small audit firm

Abstract

The importance of the legal audit for the purpose of certifying the accounts explains the interest of studying its processes and the interactions between the audited and the auditors likely to determine its quality. The objective of this paper is to understand the phenomenon of producing assurance of the conditions of the legal audit quality through the interactions between the different actors of the audit process and their behaviors.

Legal audit quality is a complex, abstract and multi-dimensional concept that is difficult to define. Its definitions are controversial because of its ambiguity. To identify this complexity, outside of any normative approach, our research is part of an inductive approach open to a phenomenology of the concept of audit quality within the framework of an ethnographic approach. The method adopted is therefore that of participating observation in the context of a legal audit mission on behalf of a hotel establishment carried out by explicit interviews.

The main results of this research contribute to determining the quality of the audit through the characteristics of the auditor, the characteristics of the auditee, the characteristics of the audit team and the characteristics of the audit engagement.

JEL Classification : M42, M48, M49

Paper type : Empirical research.