Risk on financial reporting in the context of the new audit report in Spain

After the financial crisis and with the greater complexity of financial reporting, stakeholders asked firms for more informative audit reports to close the audit expectation gap. In this context, the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) approved a new international standard on auditor’s reports. One of the major changes is the obligation for listed companies to describe the key audit matters (KAM) in the audit report, in particular, those related to the significant financial reporting risks. This paper empirically analyses the content of the new auditor’s reports after the accounting reform recently issued in Spain and the factors that condition the KAMs disclosed by auditors. Using the sample of all Spanish listed companies, our results show that these firms mostly report on two to four KAMs and the majority of these relate to revenue recognition, impairment of goodwill and deferred tax recovery in the 2017 audit reports. Applying a multinomial linear regression, the significant variables that condition the KAMs in our sample are sector, market type, and average word count. This evidence contributes to the literature by emphasizing the importance of risks in financial reporting in extended audit reports.