Transparency in the transparency reports: Empirical evidence from Portugal

Abstract

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to analyze the degree of TR transparency and its relation with the audit firm size, fees, either from audit services, or from other services, and with the human capital.

Design/methodology/approach: In this study we considered 282 audit firms, and our final sample includes 268 transparency reports from 2013 through 2017. For this period under analysis, audit firms financial information, human resources information and transparency reports were collected. TR report information was divided in four types of information: Mandatory Information I, Mandatory Information II, Voluntary Information and Extra Information.  These indexes measure the fulfillment of each information on the total of information considered in each index. Firstly, a descriptive statistical analysis of the dataset was performed, for them to address the research questions, multivariate analysis was considered.

Findings: Our results show a high level of transparency regarding mandatory information I, but a lower accomplishment regarding all other information. In general, the auditor experience, the number of auditors, the number of PIE clients and percentage of extra audit services have a significant impact on the information disclosed in the TR.

Originality/value: Our paper contributes to the current literature by assessing the influence that human capital has on the information disclosed in the transparency reports. As far as the authors know, this an original contribution of the paper.