An Investigation into the Association between Ownership and the Decision to Switch the Auditor in TSE

According to agency theory¡ structured corporate governance mechanisms should lead to financial reporting with high quality. As ownership concentration is observed as an important factor with in corporate governance (Mashayekh & Abdollahi¡ 2011)¡ it seems that the identity of controlling owners can play a crucial role in audit quality and improvement of information quality. Ownership concentration¡ throughthe increase of supervision and elimination of free riding¡ can create positive switches in the company. On the other hand¡ block holders and managers can use their control rights to achieve personal benefits and this violates the rights of other shareholders (Ebrahimi Kordlor & Erabi¡ 2010). These probabilities and the lack of effect of ownership concentration on different dimensions of company can present different theories regarding the behavior of block holders¡ and contradictory results might be reported by the researchers.
In this study¡ by controlling important factors including qualitative factors of audit (e.g. audit size and auditor’s opinion) and corporate factors (e.g. firm size¡ leverage and profitability) empirically¡ the relationship between corporate ownership concentration is investigated as one of the external mechanisms of corporate governance with the auditor switch among the companies listed in Tehran Stock exchange.
Theoretical Framework: According to the review of literature¡ the high percent of stock held by block holders is that they have great influence on management. There are two contradictory views about the role of great owners in companies.
Active Supervision Hypothesis: Regarding the relationship between major ownership and audit quality¡ Han et al.¡ (2009) state how institutional ownership affects audit quality of financial statements. They believe that institutional investors can affect corporate policies to apply corporate mechanisms to reduce supervision costs. The evidence showed that the companies mostly appoint auditors when there is high long-term institutional ownership. This shows that long-term institutional investors consider high quality audit as a method to improve corporate governance while their supervisory costs are reduced.
Opportunism Hypothesis: The followers of self-interest hypothesis believe that it is highly probable that big investors use special benefits as access to confidential information to be used for trading goals and achieving personal benefits. Fan and Wong (2002) found that the managers with control benefits reported accounting information for their personal goals and claimed that profit does not have reliability for external investors.
In this research¡ the subjects are companies listed in TSE from 2004 to 2011 (8-year period). For the hypothesis test¡ as dependent variables are artificial¡ logistic regression analysis is used. The study data are collected from Rahavard Novin and financial statements of companies from RDIS site¡ and are analyzed using SPSS18 software.
Based on the obtained results¡ there is a positive and significant relationship between internal organizational ownership and negative switch of auditor and the first hypothesis is supported. In other words¡ by the increase of internal organizational ownership¡ the negative switch of auditor is increased (using low quality auditor). The result is consistent with the report of Lin and Liu (2010). They showed that the increase of ownership of the biggest shareholder in the company was associated with the negative switch of auditor. The results of second hypothesis test showed that external organizational ownership had no significant relationship with positive switch of auditor. In other words¡ external organizational ownership had no effects on the type of auditor switch.
Conclusions and Suggestions: The results of the study showed that major internal organizational ownership had a positive and significant relationship with auditor switch decision (negative) in TSE. Based on the evidence¡ internal owners prefer the negative switching of auditor. In other words¡ internal organizational blockholders are less inclined to high quality auditors. One reason is that major internal organizational shareholders can use low quality auditors and achieve personal benefits. The results of the studies by Ebrahimi Kordlor and Erabi (2009)¡ Osta (2011)¡ Feisali (2011) and Truong and Heaney (2007) supported this hypothesis.