China's Listed Companies Audit Fees Impact Factors Research

CPA audit plays a critical role in ensuring capital market to develop its function of allocating social resources and maintaining the stability of capital market and social economy. Audit fee is an important economical link between CPAs and auditees,and is an important part of audit market and a crucial aspect of the application of CPA audit. Audit fee is also a key factor of the quality of audit and affects the sustainable development of CPA profession. Therefore audit fee is a very important topic in the audit research.The essay is designed to make an positive research into the influential factors of audit fee by constructing an audit fee model suited the audit market in our country, taking the data of the annual reports of A-share listed companies for three consecutive years 2005-2007 in stock maekets as a sample,and selecting the total assets, integrated the combined financial statement form owned subsidiary, the assets liabilities ratio,accounts receivable for the total assets ratio,the inventory for the total assets ratio,return on equity, the type of audit opinion and so on such 15 factors as varies,based on the review of related documents and theoretical analysis of influential factors of audit fee. Then the essay makes an overall and systematic research into the existence of low-balling and audit opinion-buying by T-test on the switch of CPA firms and sub-clsssifying audit opinion type.The findings show that there is close positive correlation between audit fee and total assets,the number of owned subsidiary companies,asset liabilities ratio,whether being ST company,the size of CPA firms,number of independ director, listed company registered address,and there is close negative correlation between audit fee and the inventory for the total assets ratio,current ratio,the other varies have insignificant influence on audit fee;audit fee can basically reflect CPAs' workload in Chinese stock audit market;CPAs have considered the influence of audit risk and pay more attention to listed companies' risk than before when determining audit fee,but they haven't count audit risk as critical consideration;CPA firms have preliminary brand effect in Chinese audit market; there isn't obvious evidence to prove the existence of low-balling and audit opinion buying in Chinese stock audit market; area audit fee differences exist obviously in our country. According to the findings, the article puts forward some constructive policy advice.