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Research Title: The educative function of regulatory audit quality inspections from a perspective of auditors' learning environment and attitude

Supervisor/s Name: Noel Harding and Jenny Yang

About

Jean is a PhD candidate at the School of Accounting, Auditing and Taxation.

Jean's PhD research is to explore opportunities for regulatory audit inspection programs to enhance their educative function, in addition to their oversight role. In particular, she wants to investigate whether an inspection report with more specific content and delivered in an instructive tone can develop auditors' learning attitude in favour of future audit quality.

Inspecting audit quality is costly not only from the regulator’s side but also from the auditors’ side to cope with the oversight. The current inspection programs, although they may result in an average improvement in audit quality indicators, do not pervade the benefits across the entire audit market. As such, a further development of the inspection program is needed to maximise the benefits from the considerable amount of scarce resources committed to the regulatory inspection and achieve the goal of inspections to improve the quality and consistency of auditors' work.

With a focus on auditors' learning experience, Jean is investigating on the changes in the inspection reports that can help auditors more with conducting high-quality audit work. Her study is expected to contribute to maximising the benefits from the considerable amount of the scarce public resources committed to the government inspections and assist auditors in fulfilling the public expectation to enhance trust in the capital market.