Abstract

After the collapse of Arthur Andersen in 2002, the auditing profession has faced increasing pressure fromexternal parties to enhance and improve audit quality. These pressures led to a continued need to study thefactors that affect audit quality. Until present, there is no agreement among researchers about the definition andfactors of audit quality. To date, the issue of how audit quality is measured remains a matter of controversy anddisagreement. Previous studies used alternatives to measure audit quality. This paper reviews both thearguments for and against for these studies. Although, the importance of these alternatives and its potentialcontribution on audit quality have been emphasized, they are not a justification to ignore audit characteristicsthat could have significant impact on audit quality. This paper contributes to audit literature and represents abrief overview of reviews both the arguments for and against of using audit quality alternatives in previousstudies over the past 30 years. Thus it provides a basis for discussing several potentially rich factors for futureresearch on audit quality.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.