Investigating the Relationship between Intellectual Capital and Audit Quality Based on China Audit Market

Audit quality is often considered as the probability that auditors can detect and report misstatements of clients’ financial reporting, and enhance the credibility of stakeholders on disclosed information. Hence, the importance of intellectual capital can be tracked to the audit quality of accounting firms with knowledge-intensive feature. This paper discusses a more comprehensive perspective of intellectual capital in auditing area, with the opinion that all of the four components will have critical impact on audit quality. Not only human capital and spiritual capital including such as knowledge, skills, expertise, ethics, moral and values etc., but also the rules, systems, norms within the firm and the relationship characteristics of the firm with its clients are all closely related to audit quality. This paper introduces a more complete conceptual framework of intellectual capital on the basis of exploring the factors mentioned in previous studies and discusses the influencing factors of intellectual capital on audit quality, and finally puts forward some suggestions on the structure of intellectual capital, the internal management of accounting firms and industry supervision based on China's audit market.