Salterio (2012) hypothesized that adaptations of an audit efficiency measure, audit report lag (the length of time between the financial statement year‐end date and the auditor's report date), could provide measures of underlying auditor–client management (ACM) negotiation likelihood. Salterio argued that these measures would enable archival researchers to examine issues that heretofore were the exclusive domain of experimental and field researchers. Using an audit report lag measure and a measure of abnormal audit report lag lags (the residual based on audit report lag determinants model), we show that a larger lag is associated with higher audit fees after controlling for other known determinants of audit fees. We also show that larger lags are associated with higher levels of discretionary accruals—that is, lower accrual quality. Based on our findings, we suggest that there is support for Salterio's hypothesis that audit report lags and abnormal audit report provide valid archival proxies for the differences in year‐end ACM negotiation likelihood. We suggest that this proxy will allow researchers to study issues related to published accounting numbers in light of whether negotiations are likely to have occurred in addition to providing regulators and others the means to determine what clients of audit firms are more likely to have different types of ACM relationships.

中文翻译：

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寻求审计师-客户管理谈判可能性的归档方法：审计滞后措施猜想的探索*

Salterio（2012）假设，对审计效率度量，审计报告滞后（财务报表年结日至审计师报告日之间的时间长度）进行调整可以提供对潜在审计师与客户管理（ACM）谈判可能性的度量。 。萨尔特里奥认为，这些措施将使档案研究人员能够研究迄今为止是实验和现场研究人员专有领域的问题。使用审计报告滞后度量和异常审计报告滞后度量（基于审计报告滞后决定因素模型的残差），我们表明在控制了其他已知的审计费用决定因素后，滞后越大与审计费用越高相关。我们还表明，较大的滞后与较高的可自由支配应计额相关，即较低的应计应计质量。基于我们的发现，我们建议支持Salterio的假设，即审计报告滞后而异常审计报告为年终ACM协商可能性的差异提供了有效的档案代理。我们建议，该代理人将使研究人员能够根据是否可能进行谈判来研究与已发布的会计编号相关的问题，此外，还可以为监管机构和其他机构提供确定哪些审计公司的客户更有可能拥有不同类型的会计服务的方法。 ACM关系。