Audit partner's length of audit experience and audit quality: evidence from Korea*

This paper investigates the relation between the length of an audit partner's experience as a certified public accountant and audit quality. Audit quality is measured by the magnitude of discretionary accruals and tendency to meet or miss earnings benchmarks of the client firms. This paper documents that an audit partner's experience is positively associated with audit quality and the association is more salient among non-Big 4 auditors. These findings suggest that auditors' knowledge and expertise develop with actual involvement with the clients over an extended period of time. For Big 4 audit firms, intense training, structured audit programs, and knowledge sharing opportunities are provided to individual accountants, which may weaken the dependence of audit quality on the individual partner's experience.