Honorários de auditoria no mercado de capitais brasileiro: um estudo sobre a estrutura de mercado das firmas de auditoria

Abstract

The role of an audit of financial statements is to increase the degree of confidence in the financial information presented by an entity. The conclusion of this work is the issuance of an audit report by an independent auditor and remunerated by the audited companies. Given the structure of this market, the present study seeks to evaluate the effect of the market share, concentration levels and market leadership of firms in the fees charged by them. Data were analyzed between the years 2010 and 2015 for a sample of publicly traded companies in Brazil and several control variables were used along with the variables of interest to measure whether the market share or the leadership are determining the fees, as well as verify if the highest fees represent higher quality of services. The results demonstrate a positive and significant relationship between market share, concentration and leadership with the fees charged by the audit firms, as well as a positive relationship between results management and fees. In addition to these findings, when tests were performed only with the largest firms (BigFour), significant results were found, showing that the larger market share allows higher fees even among the largest firms.