Measuring and Communicating Audit Quality: The New AQIs

Denise Dickins, PhD, CPA, CIA, and Rebecca G. Fay, PhD, CPA, and John Reisch, PhD, CPA

Audit quality has been described as the raison d'être of the audit profession, for if there is no public trust in the quality of the audit, it is of no value (S. Maijoor and A. Vanstraelen, “Research Opportunities in Auditing in the EU, Revisited,” Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, pp. 115-126). Yet, in spite of decades of research, there is little agreement on how to define audit quality, let alone how to measure it (M. L. Murphy, “Improving Audit Quality: An Interview with Cynthia M. Fornelli, Executive Director of the Center for Audit Quality,” The CPA Journal, February 2014, pp. 24-31).