Study On No Actual Controller,Audit Quality And Excess Goodwill

Along with the development of our economy and the construction of capital market,the enterprise extension type mergers and acquisitions activities increase greatly,the number of mergers and acquisitions of the explosive growth,the enterprise overall goodwill scale also expands.Goodwill refers to the potential economic value that can bring excess profits to enterprises in the future.However,in recent two years,the concentrated detonation of goodwill gradually began to attract the attention of the capital market and stakeholders.Why did the merger and acquisition activities that should bring the development of "1+1" synergistic effect of enterprises result in frequent depreciation of goodwill assets,which may even harm the survival of enterprises? Both the report of the 19th National Congress and the Report of the 20th National Congress emphasized that the huge goodwill bubble of listed companies has become one of the important factors of financial risk at present,and the problem of goodwill bubble can only be solved with direction and focus by in-depth analysis from the enterprise itself and the decision-making body of the enterprise.In recent years,more and more actual controllers of enterprises have begun to withdraw from the operation of enterprises,and their proportion of enterprise shares has gradually decreased,and the number of listed companies without actual controllers has gradually increased.By 2021,there are 293 A-share listed companies without actual controllers,accounting for 6.08% of all A-share listed companies.Then,as a product of highly dispersed ownership without actual controllers,will the management be more likely to seek private gains due to the lack of supervision by major shareholders? Will shareholders’ unclear property rights weaken the effect of shareholders’ checks and balances and intensify the interest competition among shareholders? As an external supervision mechanism,can independent audit play a positive role in the enterprise and decision-making body?Based on this,this paper starts from the perspective of corporate ownership structure,combines the principal-agent theory,the high-ladder team theory,the rent dissipation theory and the power rent-seeking theory to analyze,and carries out an empirical test.Taking A-share listed companies from 2008 to 2021 as samples,based on the subject of no actual controller,the influence on the recognition of excess goodwill is discussed.Secondly,the mechanism conduction effect of two kinds of agency conflicts in the enterprise is deeply tested.Based on the perspective of external supervision and governance,the adjustment effect of external audit governance effect on intermediary is explored.Finally,this paper explores whether the above influences are different in the specific context of different internal and external governance characteristics of enterprises.This study finds that the absence of actual controllers will aggravate the recognition of high goodwill by enterprises,and the agent conflicts between shareholders and management brought by the absence of actual controllers and the infringement of interests of major shareholders on minority shareholders are the influence paths,and the intermediary transmission will be negatively regulated by external supervision mechanism.The heterogeneity test found that in the firms with poorer audit quality and auditor industry expertise,the effect of having no actual controller to recognize excess goodwill was more significant.Based on the above conclusions,this paper puts forward relevant policy suggestions from the three levels of external regulators,enterprises and government.