State Ownership, Auditor Rotation and Audit Quality

This paper examines whether the auditor rotation affects the audit quality of state owned enterprises (SOEs) based on the data of China's listed companies that switching audit firms in the period from 2004 to 2014. The results from our sample show that the auditor rotation has significant positive impact on the audit quality of central SOEs, but not local SOEs or non-state-owned enterprises. Further analysis divides the auditor rotation into the compulsory and the optional according to the SASAC rules. The result shows that the compulsory rotation behaves better than optional rotation in improving the auditing quality for central SOEs. This paper provides some empirical evidences for perfecting the SASAC rules and China's auditing markets.