SUMMARY This study examines whether a firm's business strategy influences auditor reporting. We rely on the organizational literature to develop our prediction that firms utilizing the innovative “prospector” strategy will be more likely than firms utilizing the cost-leadership “defender” strategy to receive both going concern and material weakness opinions. Our empirical evidence supports this prediction. Specifically, we find that, among a sample of financially troubled firms, prospectors are significantly more likely than defenders to receive a going concern opinion. We then analyze a sample of clients who subsequently filed for bankruptcy and find that auditors are less likely to issue going concern opinions to prospector clients. This indicates that auditors commit more Type II errors when auditing prospector clients. We also find that prospectors are significantly more likely than defenders to receive a material weakness opinion. Taken together, the evidence suggests that business strategy is a significant determinant of both going concern and material weakness auditor reporting. JEL Classifications: M41; M42; L10. Data Availability: All data are available from public sources identified in the text.

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We investigate the effect of the PCAOB’s Part II report on annually inspected firms’ audit fees and audit quality. The PCAOB replaced the peer review auditor program with an independent inspection of audit firms. Upon completion of each inspection, the PCAOB issued inspection reports that include a public portion (Part I) of identified audit deficiencies, and (in most cases) a nonpublic portion (Part II) of identified quality control weaknesses. The Part II report is only made public when the PCAOB deems that remediation was insuffcient after at least 12 months have passed. Starting around the time of the 2007 Deloitte censure (Boone et al., 2015), the PCAOB shifted from a soft synergistic approach to an antagonistic approach, such that Part II reports were imminent, despite delays that ultimately led to their release one to four years later than expected. Our study spans the period from 2007 to 2015, and examines the effect on audit fees and audit quality at the earliest date that the Part II report could have been released – 12 months after the Part I report was issued. We find that following the 12 month period, that annually inspected audit firms eventually lost reputation by lower audit fees, while they concurrently made remedial efforts to increase the quality of their client’s financial reporting quality (abnormal accruals magnitude and restatements). However, three years after the Part II report was actually released, audit fees increased.

SUMMARY Little is known about the relationship between disclosure quality and auditor quality. We measure disclosure quality as the likelihood of a firm fully disclosing the identity of their major customers in the Form 10-K filing. We also measure voluntary disclosure by exempt smaller reporting companies (SRCs) disclosing, and all firms disclosing the identity in the audited notes, or affirming no major customers. We expect that firms are more likely to disclose when they engage higher-quality auditors who have specialized knowledge of 10-K regulations. We hand-collect a sample of more than 26,000 (34,000) major customer disclosures that we use for our main tests (voluntary disclosure tests). We find that firms are more likely to mandatorily disclose their major customers' identity when audited by either an office- or national-level specialist whose clientele consists largely of firms with major customers. We corroborate these results with other higher-quality auditor measures: Big N, second tier, and office size. We also show that SRCs are more likely to voluntarily disclose when they engage a higher-quality auditor. We provide further evidence of an association between voluntary disclosure and a higher-quality auditor by ranking disclosure quality on audited disclosure, nonaudited disclosure, and no disclosure. JEL Classifications: M42; M41; D23. Data Availability: All data are available from public sources identified in the text.