Interpretation and Use of Auditor Fee Disclosures

摘要

Publicly available fee disclosures have been used by investors and regulators to assess various matters, including the quality of a company's audit, financial reporting, and corporate governance. We find that many companies' disclosures are insufficient, standardized, or inconsistently prepared. This finding has implications for the usefulness of the data because disclosures are informative only to the extent that analysts fully understand their composition, the possibility of varying interpretations, and the potential for bias.