The Effect of Auditor Style on Reporting Quality: Evidence from Germany

This paper examines whether the ‘style’ of individual auditors influences financial reporting quality in Germany. Audit Germany should be uniformly high, because strong reputational needs, strict controls on operating procedures, and enforcement mechanisms. An audit partner's style not affect this level. However, our results do support expectation. Exploiting a unique dataset comprising names engagement review partners listed German companies, we find that have significant influence quality, beyond firm? office?level factors. In contrast, consistent quality. We measure by level firm's abnormal accruals its propensity to meet or beat an earnings target. also 2005 adoption new system includes ‘naming shaming’ does reduce partner