This study examines relation of the auditor choice and cost of debt financing for private SMEs (small and medium sized enterprises). In particular, it examines whether choice of a certified auditor or reputable international audit firm provides economic value to private SMEs as a factor lowering firms' information problems and cost of debt financing in the capital markets. Using time-series cro...

With a unique dataset of joint-stock companies, this paper describes the corporate audit structure in Russia and empirically analyses its determinants. When compared to the international standard, Russian firms have a weak audit structure in terms of the independence and expertise of the board of auditors and the accounting auditor. We found that board composition, affiliation with a business g...

1 When fair value cannot be measured by reference to matters that are directly observable, and if the measure represents little more than the measurer's state of mind, neither the measurement nor the measurement method are verifiable. In those circumstances, the independent auditor has a scope limitation and should not express an unqualified opinion on the financial statements that are material...

This study examines auditor switching using discriminant analysis and logistic regression. These two statistical techniques have been employed to show both whether auditor switching can be forecasted and which method better fits the data for companies listed on the Athens Stock Exchange. Using logistic analysis, auditor switching can be forecasted with prediction accuracy which exceeds 92.0 per...

The selection of a proper auditor is driven by several factors. Here, we use three data mining classification techniques to predict the auditor choice. The methods used are Decision Trees, Neural Networks and Support Vector Machines. The developed models are compared in term of their performances. The wrapper feature selection technique is used for the Decision Tree model. Two models reveal tha...

Expert discovery is a quest in search of finding an answer to a question: “Who is the best expert of a specific subject in a particular domain within peculiar array of parameters?” Expert with domain knowledge in any field is crucial for consulting in industry, academia and scientific community. Aim of this study is to address the issues for expert-finding task in real-world community. Collabor...

We investigate the possibility of applying artificial intelligence to solve an audit decision problem faced by the public sector (namely, the tax auditor of the Internal Revenue Services) when targeting firms for further investigation. We propose that the neural network will overcome problems faced by a direct knowledge acquisition method in building an expert system to preserve the expertise o...