Abstract
Audit quality has long been the subject of professional and academic debates. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the literature on audit quality by identifying the relative roles of auditor independence and competence as factors contributing to audit quality. We study disciplinary actions against auditors in France in order to determine whether disciplinary actions for poor audit quality are based primarily on factors related to independence or factors related to competence. We conducted a content analysis of the texts of the disciplinary decisions which enabled the development of a model explaining the reasons for the disciplinary decisions. The results of this analysis lead to two main conclusions: (1) competence issues are a more frequent cause of disciplinary actions than independence issues, (2) auditors’ personal reasons, not related to competence or independence seem to have a strong influence on audit quality.