This paper examines whether the ‘style’ of individual auditors influences financial reporting quality in Germany. Audit quality in Germany should be uniformly high, because of strong reputational needs, strict controls on operating procedures, and quality enforcement mechanisms. An audit partner's style should not affect this quality level. However, our results do not support this expectation. Exploiting a unique dataset comprising the names of the audit engagement and review partners of listed German companies, we find that audit engagement partners in Germany have a significant influence on audit quality, beyond firm‐ and office‐level factors. In contrast, audit review partners do not have a consistent significant influence on audit quality. We measure audit quality by the level of a firm's abnormal accruals and its propensity to meet or beat an earnings target. We also find that the 2005 adoption of a new audit quality enforcement system that includes ‘naming and shaming’ does not reduce the influence of audit partner style on financial reporting quality.

中文翻译：

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审计师风格对报告质量的影响：来自德国的证据

本文研究了个人审计师的“风格”是否会影响德国的财务报告质量。由于强大的声誉需求，对操作程序的严格控制以及质量执行机制，德国的审计质量应始终保持较高水平。审核伙伴的风格不应影响此质量级别。但是，我们的结果不支持这一预期。利用包含上市德国公司的审计业务和审查合作伙伴名称的独特数据集，我们发现德国的审计业务合作伙伴对审计质量的影响超过公司和办公室级别的因素。相比之下，审核审查合作伙伴对审核质量的影响并没有持续的重大影响。我们通过公司的水平来衡量审计质量。异常应计费用及其达到或超过收入目标的倾向。我们还发现，2005年采用的包括“命名和羞辱”在内的新审计质量执行系统并没有减少审计伙伴风格对财务报告质量的影响。