Determining factors affecting audit opinion in independent audit reports: An application on Borsa Istanbul

The object of this paper is to determine the factors affecting audit opinions by using data from industry firms listed on Borsa Istanbul. On the direction of this main purpose, the factors affecting qualified audit opinion as well as factors, which affect going concern qualified audit opinion and non going qualified audit opinion have been examined. To determine the factors affecting audit opinion, the financial and non financial data of the industry firms listed on Borsa Istanbul has been analyzed by methods of binary logistic regression and multinominal logistic regression during the terms of 2013-2017. Moreover, robustness test is applied to check reliance of results of the study. The results demonstrate that presence of prior qualified audit opinion and audit report lag variable are positively effective on qualified audit opinion . Also, company size affects issuing qualified audit opinion in a negative way. Moreover, it is found that prior qualified audit opinion, audit report lag variable and indebtness of company has an important and positive effect on going concern qualified opinion. There is a negative and significant relation between going concern qualified opinion and the variables of company size and liquidity position of company. The presence of prior qualified audit opinion has a positive and significant effect on the decision of non-going concern qualified opion. There is a negative and significant relation between non-going concern qualified opinion and the company size. At the result of the robustness test, it is seen differently from previous research findings that liquidity of company is not significantly effective on issuing a going concern qualified audit opinion and audit report lag variable has a positive and significant effect on issuing a non-going qualified audit opinon.