Test of Factors Influencing Financial Audit Fees

An essential process in institutionalizing democracy is accountability. It seems one of the main ingredients of economical accountability is auditing. Auditing stands in monitoring aspect of every organization and it has extended application from top to bottom of governing level in each country. For every system to be active and going on, feedback and monitoring is required. But in spite of audit’s development – because of its necessity – we can’t logically say how audit fees are determined and reasonably we can’t claim, according to firm’s characteristic and with what cost, the work would be done. In this regard, we have tested factors influencing financial audit fees. For this purpose, required data have been collected from listed firms’ financial statements and interviews with financial managers for a five years (2004- 2008) periods. After sorting the collected data, their relation with audit fees tested. Statistical method used in this study is correlation analysis through panel data and the hypothesis tested using Eviews software. Research findings showed variables such as firm’s size, complexity of firm’s operation, kind of audit firm and inflation statistically have significance relation with audit fees but variables like audit risk, education and experience of client’s financial manager don’t have significance relation with the dependent variable (audit fees).