DISCUSSION OF The Consequences of Providing Lower-Quality Audits at the Engagement Partner Level

The paper ‘‘The consequences of providing lower-quality audits at the engagement partner level’’ has been selected for presentation at the plenary session of the 2018 Journal of International Accounting Research (JIAR) conference. Chi, Lisic, Myers, Pevzner, Seidel (2019; hereafter, CLMPS) investigate the reputational consequences that engagement partners suffer for having a recent history of past audit failures. In particular, relying on the Taiwanese setting where audit quality is observable because of the engagement partner disclosure, the authors empirically provide evidence that engagement partner identification is useful in helping audit clients form opinions about partner-level audit quality. Further, the engagement partner’s prior audit quality also influences audit firms’ engagement partner selection. Overall the paper makes a significant contribution extending to audit clients the results of prior literature that found audit partners’ name disclosure useful for both investors and creditors when making judgments about the quality of audited financial information. Section II provides discussion about motivation and prior literature. Section III describes the research design, findings, and relevance. Section IV provides concluding remarks with suggestions for future research avenues.