This study examines the association between overseas and New Zealand governance regulatory reforms and New Zealand companies' audit and non-audit fees. Our models use temporal and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) indicator variables to relate the timing of the fee changes to the incidence of the overseas and local reforms. We find that audit fees increased in New Zealand over 2002-2006. Such increases associate reliably with the transition to and adoption of NZ IFRS and not with earlier overseas governance reforms. Our study also documents a decrease in non-audit fees over the same period, but we find no IFRS effect for non-audit fees. Copyright (c) The Authors. Journal compilation (c) 2009 AFAANZ.

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This study finds that the agency problems of companies with high free cash flow (FCF) and low growth opportunities induce auditors of companies in the US to raise audit fees to compensate for the additional effort. We also find that high FCF companies with high growth prospects have higher audit fees. In both cases, higher debt levels moderate the increased fees, consistent with the role of debt as a monitoring mechanism. Other mechanisms to mitigate the agency costs of FCF such as dividend payout and share repurchase (not studied earlier) do not moderate the higher audit fees.

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