Auditor resignations provide a clear signal of accounting problems or heightened audit risk; however, registrants label the vast majority of auditor changes as dismissals, which carry more ambiguity. Motivated by the opacity of current dismissal disclosures, this study explores the usefulness of these disclosures compared to an alternative signal – the timing of the dismissal within the reporting year – for inferring the causes and implications of dismissals. Dividing the reporting year into key periods, we find that the probabilities of future restatements, material weaknesses, and delistings following a dismissal generally increase within the reporting year while negative circumstances disclosed do not. Analyses suggest that the timing patterns are caused by burgeoning, yet undisclosed, conflicts between the client and the outgoing auditor, rather than by transition difficulties involving the new auditor (as prior literature claims). The timing patterns strongly persist after controlling for negative circumstances that registrants disclose in the dismissal filing, suggesting that the disclosures are not fully revealing. In fact, disclosed negative circumstances have no incremental predictive power for future restatements and delistings. Our results suggest a severe lack of informativeness of current disclosures and support previous calls for improvement of dismissal disclosure regulation.

审计师辞职提供了会计问题或审计风险增加的明确信号；然而，注册人将绝大多数审计师变更标记为解雇，这带来了更多的含糊不清。由于当前解雇披露的不透明性，本研究探讨了这些披露与替代信号（报告年度内解雇的时间）相比的有用性，以推断解雇的原因和影响。将报告年度划分为关键时期，我们发现未来重述、重大缺陷和被解雇后退市的可能性在报告年度内普遍增加，而披露的负面情况则不会。分析表明，时间模式是由迅速发展引起的，但尚未公开，客户和即将离任的审计师之间的冲突，而不是由于涉及新审计师的过渡困难（如先前的文献所述）。在控制了注册人在解雇文件中披露的负面情况后，时间模式仍然存在，这表明披露并未完全揭示。事实上，披露的负面情况对未来的重述和退市没有增加的预测能力。我们的研究结果表明当前披露严重缺乏信息性，并支持先前要求改进解雇披露监管的呼吁。