The effects of IFRS adoption and firm size on audit fees in financial institutions in Ghana

This study aims to investigate the effects of international financial reporting standards (IFRS) adoption and firm size on auditors’ fees determination in the Ghanaian financial industry.

The authors use the annual report of 52 listed and non-listed firms spanning from 2003 to 2014. Guided by the hypotheses, the authors conditioned audit fees on IFRS adoption and firm size and execute robust fixed effects panel regression.

The results show that IFRS adoption has a positive coefficient with audit fees suggesting that the adoption of IFRS, indeed, increases the audit fees paid by banks and insurance firms, as well as the industry as a whole. The results are consistent with the idea that IFRS adoption increases auditor efforts with respect to time and complex nature of some aspect of the standards. Again, as expected, the coefficient of size is positively and significantly related to audit fees. This indicates that the size of the auditee plays a vital role in determining audit fees.

The study is limited by industry (i.e. the financial services industry) and geography (i.e. Ghana). The authors propose further research that will widely consider other sectors and countries to improve the current scanty literature in this area. Besides, theoretically, the study is limited to the lending credibility theory and feels compelled to reiterate the importance of considering alternative theoretical perspective(s) in future research.

This study is significant to practitioners as it demonstrates the importance of the determinants of the auditors’ fees. It helps auditors to apply the relevant charging formula when determining audit fees, while it helps managers to improve upon the quality of reporting to control audit bill and forecasting their audit expenditure.

The results of the study extend the literature on the cost side of IFRS adoption by investigating the financial services industry and non-listed firms in a new context, i.e. a developing country where this research is uncharted. The existing studies based their analysis on either cross-section or pooled analysis and shorter post-adoption period (Cameran and Perotti, 2014). However, using an extended post-adoption period data, the authors base the study on analytical panel model, which directly examine the cost side of IFRS adoption with size as joint key explanatory variables with emphasis on financial institutions and external auditors.