Partner workloads, audit quality, and rank hours*

Abstract

We examine whether partner workload is associated with audit quality and the amount and mix of audit labor used. In decentralized human capital intensive audit firms, individual partners play a central role, making every important decision in auditing. Although the primary concern of the regulators seems to be that an excessive partner workload can harm audit quality due to the potential inadequate attention to individual engagements, the relationship between partner workload and audit quality is still being debated. Exploiting the dataset with the partner identity and the amount of total and mix of audit labor used for individual engagements of public and private companies in Korea for the period of 2014–2016, we find that partner workload is positively associated with audit quality measured by three alternative proxies commonly employed in the literature. We also find that partner workload is positively related with audit fees. In addition, we find that partner workload is positively associated with total audit hours, suggesting that busy partners use more labor resources than do their less busy counterparts. When total engagement hours are disaggregated into audit labor rank hours, we find that audit teams led by busy partners spend less partner hours but more senior and junior hours. Lastly, we find that our results are driven mainly by audit partners in the non-Big4 firms. © 2020, Korean Accounting Association. All rights reserved.