关键词: 审计合伙人, 退伙, 审计质量, 晚节效应, 期限效应

Abstract: In partnership accounting firms, audit partners take on multiple roles, including the practitioner, the owner, and the successor. After over 40 years of development since its restoration with the adoption of the Reform and Opening-up Policy, the presence of “aging partners and poor intergenerational structure” has become the norm in partnership accounting firms today, which are generally facing the problem of intergenerational succession, namely, “the replacement of senior workers with younger ones”. Nonetheless, as a key end of intergenerational succession, partner withdrawal should be regulated with a scientific and orderly mechanism, which is a fundamental solution to the problem of intergenerational succession.
   The withdrawal from partnership is a significant role transition in the career life cycle of partners and results in substantial changes in their economic benefits as well. Hence it will probably affect the mental participation and behavioral decision-making of the withdrawing partners and consequently have an influence on the audit quality, which poses a practical issue worth exploring. Based on the withdrawal records of audit partners in accounting firms with security qualifications, this paper examines how the withdrawal of partners affects the audit quality and its constraint mechanisms. The research findings are as follows: (1) Compared to their usual performance, partners provide higher-quality audit services prior to the withdrawal, demonstrating “the effect of pre-exit integrity”, rather than “the deadline effect”. (2) From the perspective of further division of withdrawal models, complete withdrawal leads to a stronger “effect of pre-exit integrity” and fewer opportunistic behaviors, and ensures higher audit quality, compared to the re-employment by the original firm. (3) The analysis of governance mechanisms finds that stricter internal governance of accounting firms contributes more to the quality of audit services before the withdrawal of partners and to the realization of high-quality and high-efficiency withdrawal. In addition, further analysis explores the effect of constraint mechanisms on partner withdrawal from three dimensions including individual heterogeneity, peer monitoring, and the external market. It is observed that both the “effect of pre-exit integrity” and the withdrawal efficiency increase with the lengthening of service, the intensification of peer monitoring, and the enhancement of the level of the external market development.
   To sum up, based on audit theories and from the perspective of intergenerational succession, this paper reveals the influence of partner withdrawal on the personal psychology and behavioral decision-making of the concerned partners as well as the audit quality, clarifies how different withdrawal models and constraint mechanisms serve to regulate the withdrawal behaviors of partners and the consequences arising therefrom, and expands the research horizons of individual auditors and the framework of theoretical research on the audit quality. Moreover, with regard to audit practices, this paper provides both theoretical basis and policy inspirations for the accounting firms to reasonably design the partner withdrawal mechanism, and for the supervising department to scientifically develop standard regulations on the intergenerational succession of partners.

Key words: Audit Partner, Withdrawal, Audit Quality, Pre-exit Integrity Effect, Deadline Effect