Efeitos da divulgação dos principais assuntos de auditoria no retorno das ações no mercado de capitais brasileiro

Abstract

The independent auditor's report plays an important role in the disclosure of the financial statements, since it brings credibility to this information that may influence the decision of the investors and, consequently, the price of the shares. Thus, it is relevant to analyze whether the information in this report has been useful to the market, especially with the disclosure of themain audit issues that highlight the risks identified during the execution of the audit, which could generate material misstatement in the accounting information. In this perspective, the present research aims to investigate the market reaction to the disclosure of the main auditing issues in the independent auditor's report for the year 2016. Thus, for this research was applied an Event Study with 104 Brazilian companies listed in the B3, estimating the abnormal returns for an interval of two days after the disclosure. It was observed that 94 companies are audited by Big Four firms, only 5.8% of companies had an audit report with modified opinion, an average of 3.06 EAP was reported for each report, and recognition of revenues and provisions two recurring subjects in the reports analyzed. The results obtained allow us to conclude that the market was efficient since the abnormal returns were not different than expected, showing that it was not possible to obtain abnormal returns given the set of accounting information available in the market. Also, it was observed that profit remains as an important variable in the behavior of prices, as well as it was also noticed that the disclosure of the main audit subjects in the independent auditor's report was informative and negatively affected the abnormal returns of the shares.