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Quantifying Audit Quality: A Proposal Inspired By Recent Initiatives, Mary Ellen Oliverio, Bernard H. Newman

Faculty Working Papers

Audit quality has gained intensive attention since the cascade of audit failures in the concluding years of the last century and the first few years of our new century. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 [hereafter identified as the Act] introduced a new oversight strategy to enhance the quality of audits. To assure the performance of quality audits, the PCAOB was charged with responsibility for inspecting registered public accounting firms that perform financial audits for publicly-owned companies in the United States. To date, however, this process has not resulted in measurement of audit quality.

Since 2002, there have been two additional …