The study aims to know the relationship between the professional skepticism of the auditor and the discovery of fraud and errors in the financial statements, as the auditor's practice of professional skepticism enhances his ability to issue a neutral technical opinion about the fairness of financial statements. The study also examined the relationship of professional skepticism with audit risks, especially the risks that management controls and is responsible for, which are control risks and inherent risks. The auditor should not be satisfied with less than convincing evidence. No matter how honest and fair the management and those responsible for institutional control are, this should not prevent the auditor from using professional skepticism. In order to enhance the auditor's confidence in the audit outcome and not to rush into his ruling on financial statements, international audit standards urged the need to exercise professional skepticism at all stages of auditing to provide quality in the audit process and give confidence to internal and external users of those statements. The study recommended through examining and evaluating 112 questionnaires distributed to auditing offices and companies to pay attention to the practice of professional skepticism, especially in the event that the management and those responsible for institutional control do not respond to the auditor's inquiries. Also; the study recommended that auditors should not come to final decisions until sufficient, appropriate and reliable evidence has been obtained; through which they can reach the conviction of issuing impartial technical opinion.   Received: 11 December 2020 / Accepted: 2 February 2021 / Published: 5 March 2021

The objective of this study is to measure the level of conservatism in accounting policies and its effect on disclosure quality in commercial banks in Jordan. The research was implemented on the Jordanian commercial banks listed at Amman Stock Exchange from the period 2005 to 2014. The study population consists (14) banks used as a sample. The total data observations for the last 10 years were (130), (29) of which were dismissed either because missing observation or outlier, leaving a final study sample of (101) observations. The research used the book value-to-market value ratio and the accruals-to-profit (before extraordinary events and discontinued operations) ratio as proxies for conservatism. While the level of compliance with disclosure instructions was used as a proxy for disclosure quality. The study used two hypotheses to achieve its goals. The results showed that there is a good level of conservatism in accounting policies used by Jordanian commercial banks, which is one of the banking sector characteristics. The study showed a significant effect of accounting conservatism measured by using the accruals-to-profit ratio on the disclosure quality, but not when using the book value-to-market value ratio. This difference in results could be referred to the presence of pure accounting factors in the accruals-to-profit ratio, but there are additional environmental factors in the book value-to-market value ratio.

This study has aimed to demonstrate the relative importance of financial analysis using ratios for each of lenders and investors in Jordan when making decision.Also; this study, included the financial ratios that could be adopted by decision makers in the industry (area) of lending or investment. The study included two categories; first is the category of financial intermediaries; to express the category of investors in Amman stock exchange (ASE), while the second category included employees of credit departments -in Jordanian banks- for the category of lenders.The collection of study data was based on a review of the subject's scientific literature, previous studies and by preparing a questionnaire that was designed on the basis of the theoretical framework of the study and its hypotheses.The objectives of financial analysis are to judge the efficiency of management and to use the information available to make various administrative decisions. The study found that financial ratios are used by data users when making decisions related to investment and lending. The results of the study also revealed the interest of lenders in debt and liquidity ratios, while investors' attention is focused on profitability and market ratios.

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This study aimed to test the effect of information asymmetry on the stock return in the presence of accounting conservatism in industrial companies listed in Amman Stock Exchange (ASE) in the period from 2006 to 2012. The study found that investors who have private information can benefit from that through achieving outstanding returns, which means that information asymmetry affects the stock return positively, but when taking into consideration the conservative accounting policies practiced by management, this effect was faded.