Audit Seasonality, Information Disclosure Quality and Audit Quality

This study empirically investigates the impact of disclosure quality and audit seasonality on audit fees. Disclosure quality measured by disclosure scores maintained by each firm from Tehran security and stock exchange, seasonality measured by firm’s fiscal year ends and audit fees measured by natural logarithm of fees paid by clients to auditors. The sample consists of 125 firms that accepted in Tehran stock exchange during 1388 – 1395. According to the requirements of the statistical section, the data of 120 companies in the 5-year period were analyzed. In this research, descriptive statistics including tables and charts, central tendencies, dispersion, distributions for describing the sample, and combined regression method were used to analyze the data related to the research aspects. The Excel software was used to extract the data and the Eviews software was used to perform statistical tests. And the Chow test was used to determine if the combined data is more efficient to estimate the desired function, and Fisher's statistic was used to examine the significance of the regression model. Also, t-Student statistic was used to examine the significance of the coefficients of the explanatory variables of regression model and Durbin-Watson test was used to investigate the non-self-correlation of model residuals. The results show that there is a significantly negative relation between disclosure quality and audit fees. Also the results show that this significant relation holds for busy season, not in off-season.