An experiment puts auditing under scrutiny
The structure of the auditing business appears problematic: Typically, major companies pay auditors to examine their books under the so-called “third-party” audit system. But when an auditing firm’s revenues come directly from its clients, the auditors have an incentive not to deliver bad news to them. So: Does this arrangement affect the actual performance of auditors? In an eye-opening experiment involving roughly 500 industrial plants in the state of Gujarat, in western India, changing the auditing system has indeed produced dramatically different outcomes — reducing pollution, and more generally calling into question the whole practice of letting firms pay the auditors who scrutinize them. “There is a fundamental conflict of interest in the way auditing markets are set up around the world,” says MIT economist Michael Greenstone, one of the co-authors of the study, whose findings are published today in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. “We suggested some reforms to...