| In recent years,the COVID-19 pandemic and the complex and grim international situation have created uncertainties and downward pressure on the global economy.To build a community with a shared future for mankind and promote sustainable development has become an increasingly broad consensus of the international community.The report on the Party’s 20 th National Congress called for "accelerating the establishment of a new development pattern and focusing on promoting high-quality development." On the new journey of building a modern socialist country in an all-round way,enterprises,as the main body of microeconomy,should implement the five development concepts,take the initiative to assume the responsibilities of environmental protection,social responsibility and corporate governance,improve the capacity of sustainable development,become an important promoter of economic and social transformation and high-quality development,and provide inexhaustible driving force for the modernization drive.ESG is an acronym of Environment,Social and Governance.It reflects the performance of enterprises in environmental protection,social responsibility and corporate governance.It is an important tool for promoting high-quality development in line with the trend of The Times.In recent years,in order to encourage enterprises to pay attention to and improve their own ESG performance,Chinese government departments,regulators and industry associations have launched a series of policies to enhance enterprise ESG information disclosure,improve enterprise ESG performance and guide investors to practice ESG investment philosophy.Research shows that the improvement of enterprise ESG performance has an important impact on investment efficiency,financing cost,financial performance,enterprise value and enterprise innovation,which can stimulate the endogenous power of enterprises and promote the sustainable development of enterprises.From the perspective of audit,as a non-financial information evaluation system,ESG can form an important supplement to financial information and will inevitably have an important impact on audit opinions.Based on the above background,this paper selects relevant variables such as ESG performance and audit opinions,and proposes research hypotheses based on sustainable development theory,corporate social responsibility theory,modern risk-oriented audit theory and principal-agent theory.Taking 2,616 A-share listed companies from 2011 to2021 as samples,descriptive statistics,correlation analysis,multiple regression analysis and other methods are adopted.Explore the impact of ESG performance on audit opinions.The study found that the better the ESG performance of an enterprise,the less likely it is to be issued non-standard audit opinion,and the business risk and information disclosure quality have an intermediary effect.Auditors believe that enterprises with good ESG performance have lower business risk and higher information disclosure quality,and thus the less likely it is to be issued non-standard audit opinion.Heterogeneity analysis shows that in enterprises with lower quality of internal control and less attention from analysts,ESG performance has a more significant inhibitory effect on non-standard audit opinions.According to the above conclusions,this paper puts forward countermeasures and suggestions from different perspectives such as government,accounting firms,enterprises and investors: Government departments should strengthen ESG supervision of enterprises,improve ESG evaluation indicators,and establish a unified ESG rating system;Enterprises should attach importance to their own ESG performance,establish an ESG construction system,and strive to improve the level of ESG performance.Accounting firms should incorporate ESG performance into audit risk assessment factors,constantly enhance auditor competence,and make audit decisions prudently.Investors should keep pace with The Times,establish ESG investment concept,and be good at using ESG information for investment.The innovation of this paper lies in the following aspects: first,it explores the influence of ESG performance on audit opinions,expands the research perspective of the economic consequences of ESG performance and influencing factors of audit opinions,helps to enrich relevant theories and empirical research,and is of great significance for promoting the development of enterprise ESG and improving the audit quality;Second,this paper explores the mechanism of the influence of ESG performance on audit opinions by taking business risk and the quality of information disclosure as mediating variables,opening the "black box" between ESG performance and audit opinions,and providing new research ideas for the subsequent relevant research.Thirdly,the heterogeneity analysis is carried out to explore the difference in the influence of ESG performance on audit opinions in enterprises with different internal control quality and different analyst attention,so as to provide help for the strategy formulation of different enterprises. |
