Empirical research on European companies and factors influencing key audit matters disclosure

Abstract. The paper aims to determine factors influencing the disclosure of the Key Audit Matters in the Audit Report at large European companies. The paper proposes an analysis over a period of 4 years from 2017-2020 of 1,681 European companies available on the Audit Analytics database by assessing eight hypotheses that contain factors that might influence KAMs disclosures, namely: the industry and country of the audited company, audit fee, gender of the audit partner, type of auditor (Big4/ non-BIG4), type of audit opinion and going concern risks and financial performance indicators (ROA, ROE, ROI). These hypotheses will be tested by using a regression model. Based on the analysed papers addressing the proposed topic, it is expected that the study results would show positive correlations between the above-listed factors and the number of KAMs disclosed. At the time of this writing and to the author’s best knowledge, no significant amount of such studies targeting the factors influencing the key audit matters disclosure has been conducted, and the research gap in the audit literature regarding the factors influencing KAMs still exists. Moreover, the research intends to contribute to the general public’s understanding of the main auditing issues in European companies that are relevant to the auditors, providing evidence on factors associated with KAMs disclosure. This paper is helpful for auditing standards setters and the users of the financial statements. Nevertheless, it facilitates the decrease of the expectation gap between the auditors and the audit report users.