Information Content of Audit report in Predicting Bankruptcy

The efficiency of investment decisions depends on the accuracy of information available to investors and auditing is a means to ensure that companies provide their information accurately. When a company faces a significant bankruptcy probability, one of the main duties of the auditor is to alert investors to the risk of bankruptcy. The purpose of this study is to investigate the information content of audit reports in predicting bankruptcy. For this purpose, during the period 2012 to 2016 data from 192 companies and mixed logit regression have been used. Results showed that there is no significant relationship between the type of the previous year audit report and the paragraphs related to the going concern problems and the legal claim therein with the bankruptcy index this year. Therefore, it can be argued that in order to predict the bankruptcy, the previous year audit report and the going concern paragraphs in it, is lacking in information content. Among the public financial information, there is a negative relationship between equity returns and operating profit margin last year with a bankruptcy index and there is a positive and significant relationship between the previous year financial leverage and the bankruptcy index.