An Assessment of mandatory audit firm rotation and limitation of non-audit services imposed by the Regulation (EU) No 537/2014: Evidence from Spain

Abstract

On May 27, 2014, Regulation (EU) No 537/2014 was published in the Official Journal of the European Union. Aiming to enhance audit quality, the new regulation establishes, among other measures, a maximum tenure of ten years with the audit firm and important limitations to the provision of non-audit services to audit clients by the audit firm. However, it should be noted that the extant research does not unambiguously support that long audit firm tenures or non-audit services impair the quality of audits. This research studies whether these provisions have been empirically associated with reduced audit quality for Spain. Because of its low litigation risk, the potentially negative impact of tenure and non-audit services on audit quality should be clearly observed in the Spanish audit market. Nevertheless, we do not report significantly lower levels of audit quality associated with either long tenures or non-audit services. Our results may have some interesting policy implication as they seem to put into question the necessity of such a regulation for the audit sector.