Audit Demand in Private Firms: Coping With Complexity

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to provide auditing researchers with a conceptual framework to cope with the complexity related to examining audit demand in a private firm context. Although audit demand is a widely discussed topic in auditing and accounting literature, most of this literature focuses on large listed companies while it is argued that the monitoring value of auditing might be at least as important or even more important for private firms as it is for public firms. Moreover, key governance instruments of listed firms are generally found to become more and more similar due to regulation. Examining private firms could therefore give a better answer to the question what determines audit demand. Although some interesting contributions have already been made, these contributions generally fail in taking into account the high complexity of private firms. This paper therefore offers a conceptual framework to cope with this complexity. We constructed this framework based on audit literature, board literature and family firm literature as these different streams all provide some aspects that might influence audit demand in this specific context. The framework clearly depicts that past audit literature has largely focused on the traditional agency conflicts between owners and managers on the one side and between shareholders and debtholders on the other. Although most private firms are family firms, measures for family-related agency conflicts are generally lacking. Moreover, our framework also depicts that board aspects are only to a very limited extent included in audit demand research. While a lot of audit demand studies ignore the role of boards of directors in general, others measure the control effectiveness of boards by their formal state of independence. However, recent board literature states that board effectiveness is not only determined by the demographic features of boards but also by board processes and the motivation and skills of individual directors within these boards. The aforementioned limitations indicate possibilities for future research as our framework can be used as a guide to further develop this interesting research domain.