關鍵查核事項與財務條款關聯性之研究

Abstract

2017年6月1日美國公開公司會計監督委員會（Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, PCAOB）頒布新的審計準則，該準則要求會計師出具之查核報告中需包含關鍵查核事項，該段落的內容包含和審計委員會溝通的事項、與財務報表有關之重大會計項目及揭露以及涉及到特別具有挑戰性、主觀或複雜的會計師判斷，該規定提升財務報表透明度以及溝通價值，也因而增進會計資訊的品質。而於債務市場中，會計品質的好壞與債務契約的簽訂攸關，直接影響到債權人對於債務人事前與事後的風險評估，因此，本研究想探討關鍵查核事項段的揭露與財務條款的關聯性。 對於關鍵查核事項段落的揭露規定實施的成果，過去研究多以較早實施關鍵查核報告之國家（例如：英國）的資料作為分析對象，本研究針對美國公司樣本進行實證研究，探討關鍵查核事項的揭露對於財務條款的影響。研究樣本的期間為西元2017年中至2021年中之美國大型加速申報公司，研究中使用「最小平方迴歸分析法」進行實證分析，實證結果發現關鍵查核事項段的揭露會造成財務條款的減少。本研究亦將財務條約細分為績效條款與資本條款，並得出關鍵查核事項段的揭露對於績效條款的影響較為顯著之結果。

On June 1, 2017, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) issued a new auditing standard, which requires that the audit report issued by the accountant should include critical audit matters (CAMs), the content of which contains matters communicated with the Audit Committee, significant accounts and disclosures related to financial statements, as well as those involving particularly challenging, subjective or complex judgments by accountants. This requirement enhances the transparency and communication values of financial information and improves the quality of accounting information. The quality of financial disclosures directly affects the risk assessment by the creditors, which in turn affects the content of bank loan contracts. Therefore, this study intends to explore the correlation between the disclosure of critical audit matters and the financial covenants. Prior CAM-related research generally uses data in countries that adopt CAM audit reports earlier, such as the UK, to examine their research question. This study conducts an empirical analysis on a sample in the USA to explore the impact of critical audit matters on financial covenants. The empirical results show that disclosing the critical audit matter will decrease the number of financial covenants in a bank loan contract. This study also classifies financial covenants into performance covenants and capital covenants and finds that the disclosure of critical audit matter has a significant impact on performance covenants.