Auditor's role in corporate government: Evidence from top 50 quoted companies in Thailand

Abstract

This pilot research aims to clarity whether auditors take their role as corporate governance Watchdog to firms. The long-range project dreams to use several research methodologies to Investigate auditors’ role in corporate governance. This study primarily attempts to use public data to answer the concern. The data set comprises the SET 50 quoted companies between 2008 and 2009 in the emerging Thai Stock Market. The study introduces auditors’ contributions ( i.e. audit reports) as well as audit quality (i.e. Big 4) as proxy of auditors’ role in corporate governance. In addition, this study also adopts specific characteristics Thai culture into the analysis among others. The research methodology employs multiple regression analysis. Fortunately, the results show that Thai auditors take their roles in corporate governance. However, discretionary accrual (DCA) as the interesting variable is not statistically significant to firm value. This empirical study points out auditors can be considers as “watchdog” of the firms.