R&D Investment And Audit Opinion Shopping

Under the guidance of innovation strategy in China,R&D investment of listed companies is growing rapidly.However,due to the long-term,massive investment and uncertainty of R&D activities,the corporate risk caused by the increase in R&D intensity often puts managers under deep pressure,coupled with the flexibility of accounting treatment,there are some listed companies using R&D for financial fraud.At the same time,in recent years,there have been cases in which accounting firms were subject to administrative penalties by CSRC due to issuing false audit reports.The trust crisis in the audit industry is serious.Existing researches have conducted a rich discussion on the motivations,implementation and influencing factors of audit opinion shopping,but no scholars have explored the relationship between R&D intensity and audit opinion shopping.This paper takes A-share listed firms during 2010-2019 as a sample,and empirically tests the influence of R&D intensity on audit opinion shopping based on Lennox model.The results show that:(1)listed companies can purchase audit opinions through changing accounting firms,especially when they have a stronger R&D intensity;(2)in non-stateowned companies,the impact of R&D intensity on audit opinion shopping is more significant than in state-owned ones;(3)compared with the companies with lower shareholding ratio of large shareholders,the impact of R&D intensity on audit opinion shopping of companies with higher shareholding ratio of large shareholders is restrained.For the first time,this paper puts R&D intensity and audit opinion shopping into the same analytical framework,and further confirms the adjustment mechanism of property nature and ownership structure,and fills in the research gap of economic consequences of R&D investment and the influence factors of audit opinion shopping,thus may provide useful references for future research and regulatory policy-making.