Opportunistic Behavior and the Impact on Audit Quality in Albania

Shyqyri Llaci – Faculty of Economics, University of Tirana, Str. “Arben Broci”, Tirana, Albania

Blanka Xhani – Faculty of Economics, University of Tirana, Str. “Arben Broci”, Tirana, Albania

Abstract: The 21st century has witnessed the bankruptcy of many large cor­porations because of the opportunistic behavior of management reflected in the financial statement. A realistic review from the board of directors to the internal management can only be carried out with genuine data, which are distributed along with the financial statements. This allows shareholders and other stakeholders to examine the company’s performance and make accu­rate decisions.

All this control is carried out by external auditors who certify the financial statements. Although it is challenging to evaluate an auditor’s job, this pa­per sought to pinpoint the causes of their opportunistic conduct in this study. The authors examined five variables that could cause opportunistic behav­ior, including time budget pressure, client importance, personality type and turnover intention, and analyzed their attitude to critical ethical issues in situ­ations they face during their work as external auditors.

This research is based on the quantitative primary data. The sampled popula­tion is 150 auditors in Tirana, from the 236 certified auditors registered in Alba­nia, until February 2023; also, from the 65 audit firms, only the Big 4 are taken, to gather primary data and regression analysis is used to examine every sin­gle one of them. The questionnaire was created based on previous studies and was distributed through a survey in Google Forms, using a hybrid data collec­tion approach. As a primary step, a literature review was conducted regard­ing the ethical issues of an auditor during the audit of financial statements.

The study concludes that time budget pressure, client importance, and per­sonality type were the most important factors for the opportunistic behav­ior of auditors in Albania, and has found that the impact of the turnover fac­tor is minimal.

7th International Scientific Conference – EMAN 2023 – Economics and Management: How to Cope With Disrupted Times, Ljubljana, Slovenia, March 23, 2023, CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS, published by: Association of Economists and Managers of the Balkans, Belgrade, Serbia; ISBN 978-86-80194-69-1, ISSN 2683-4510, DOI: https://doi.org/10.31410/EMAN.2023

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission. 

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