SUMMARY Mandatory auditor rotation was recently proposed for the European Union and is also under consideration in the United States. There has been little research into either the benefits or costs of rotation in a true mandatory setting that could inform intelligent policy making. Our paper helps fill this gap by examining Italy, where mandatory rotation of auditors has been required since 1975. We find that outgoing auditors do not shirk on effort (or quality), but final-year fees are 7 percent higher than normal, which may indicate opportunistic pricing. The fees of incoming auditors are discounted by 16 percent even though they have abnormally higher engagement hours in the first year (17 percent), which is suggestive of lowballing. However, subsequent fees are abnormally higher and exceed the initial fee discount. Thus, the costs of mandatory rotation are nontrivial. Higher costs could be acceptable if rotation improves audit quality, but we find evidence of the opposite. Namely, the quality of audited earnings is lower in the first three years following rotation, relative to later years of auditor tenure. Since rotation is costly and earnings quality improves with longer auditor tenure, the evidence from Italy does not support the case for mandatory rotation.

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Following Arthur Andersen's conviction for obstructing justice, auditors faced a one-time significant change in their regulatory environment because it was clear that (i) major audit partnerships could be closed and (ii) post Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), regulators would take a far more attentive (aggressive) role. In response auditors considered whether the pricing of audits should be revised to take account of the increased risk of regulatory intervention and litigation. Obviously such re-pricing would need to be targeted at those firms for which the risks were greatest. One early warning signal of such events occurring is the issuance by the Security Exchange Commission (SEC) of a Comment Letter (CL). We investigate whether there is any evidence that if a client receives a CL this is used to re-price audit services. Specifically, we investigate whether issuance resulted in upward pressure on audit fees, and whether this effect was simply transient around the issuance period or alternatively persisted some years into the future. This research finds that after a client receives a CL, auditors adjust audit fees upwards in the period in which the CL is received. In addition it is shown that for subsequent periods in which the auditor does not spend time assisting the client respond to a specific CL, an initial rise in audit fee persists. This is consistent with the hypothesis that auditors reassess the reputation and litigation risk of the client on the basis of the SEC issuance of a Comment Letter.

EU gave the opportunity to each Member State to oblige/allow non-listed (i.e., private) companies to use international financial reporting standards (IFRS). Considering a sample of Italian private companies that switched to IFRS in the time span from 2005 to 2008, we compare financial reporting quality between IFRS adopters and a matched sample of companies still using local (Italian) generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). This should be of interest for the EU Commission in evaluating the impact of the current financial reporting regulation and for EU national regulators, who are left with a certain degree of flexibility in endorsing parts of the European legislation. Overall, our results show that IFRS adoption did not improve reporting quality among private companies but, on the contrary, decreased it. As companies can exploit the level of flexibility embedded in IFRS to pursue their own reporting interests, separate analyses were conducted taking into consideration firms’ incentives. In particular, assuming that entities controlled by listed companies might have switched to IFRS mainly for complying with parent company requirements and/or simplifying the financial reporting process, we run the analyses separately for this sub-sample and other firms. Findings reveal signs of earnings quality deterioration for both groups although the impact seems slightly worse for subsidiaries of listed companies.