Audit Tenure And Audit Fees Behaviour In Nigeria: A Case Study Of Nigeria Banking Sector

ABSTRACT Audit tenure and audit fee are critical variables that have been placed on the pedestal of auditing and accounting researches. The potential of these variables in influencing the independence of the auditor and consequently the financial reporting process, justifies the enormity in the level of interest that both variables have stimulated across an eclectic range of researchers, policy makers, academics and management practitioners/Auditors have a statutory duty to report on the truth and fairness of the stewardship report prepared by the management to the owners of the business. Further, stakeholders such as investors, financial institutions, governments and employees are often guided in many ways by the reports provided by the management in respect of the firm's financial position as certified by the auditor (Francis, 2004, KPMG, 2008). Consequently, auditor's independence is fundamental to public confidence in the reporting and auditing process as well as the reliability of the auditor's report. A discourse on the conceptual underpinnings of both variables; audit tenure and audit fee, reveals that with regards to audit tenure there is a growing body of literature indicating that the length of time spent by an auditor with a client has implications on the independence and objectivity of the auditor and indeed the audit process (Johnson, Khurana, and Reynolds 2002; Ghosh and Moon 2003). though the arguments are at polarity, two major schools of thoughts have emerged provide explicit evidence on the theoretical divergences. One school of argues    that short auditor tenure has negative effect on the quality of financial reporting. According to Johnson et al. (2002) proponents of this view interprets the empirical findings showing negative effects of tenure on the quality of the financial reporting process as a lack of client-specific knowledge in the early years of an audit and inferred that mandatory auditor rotation between audit firms may result in lower quality of audits owing to short audit-firm tenure. 


TABLE OF CONTENT
CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1.1  BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY 1.2     STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM 1.3      OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY 1.4      HYPOTHESIS OF THE STUDY 1.5     SCOPE OF THE STUDY 1.6     LIMITATION OF THE STUDY 1.7     SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1      INTRODUCTION 2.2    AUDIT TENURE: CONCEPT AND ISSUES 2.4  AUDIT TENURE AND AUDIT FEE
CHAPTER THREE RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY 3.1     INTRODUCTION 3.2     RESEARCH DESIGN 3.3     SCOPE OF THE STUDY 3.4     POPULATION AND SAMPLE 3.5     SOURCES OF DATA 3.6.    DATA ANALYSIS METHOD 3.7      MODEL SPECIFICATION
CHAPTER FOUR PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS OF RESULT 4.1 INTRODUCTION 4.2 PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS OF RESULT           4.3     HYPOTHESES TESTING

CHAPTER FIVE SUMMARY OF FINDINGS, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 5.1      SUMMARY OF FINDINGS 5.2 CONCLUSION 5.3 RECOMMENDATIONS 5.4     RECOMMENDATION FOR FURTHER STUDY BIBLIOGRAPHY