Purpose: This study examines the association between accruals quality and gender of the firm's audit engagement partner in Indonesia. Specifically, prior studies provide evidence that gender-based difference in diligence, conservatism and risk tolerance, it is plausible that female auditors may improve audit quality. Indonesia provides a valuable research setting to investigate the issue, as it is mandatory to disclose the identity of the audit partners in the audit reports.Design/methodology/approach: This study employs multivariate regression model to test the hypothesis, which examines the association between accruals quality and audit partners gender. Using a sample of Indonesian publicly listed firms, we run a panel of regression of audit quality measure proxied by abnormal accruals on female auditor variable and firm-specific controls. To triangulate the results, we also conduct sensitivity analysis using high and low category of abnormal accruals, an alternative measure of accruals quality (i.e. Beneish's M score) and propensity score matching (PSM).Findings: We find that firms with female audit engagement partners are not associated with smaller abnormal accruals, thereby implying that female auditors may not constrain effects on earnings management. In other words, gender is not an important predictor for audit quality in Indonesia.Research limitations/implications: We are not able to use broader measures of audit quality such as GAAP violations/restatement, litigation or audit fee. This is because the Indonesian setting somewhat limits us to collect them due to lack of regulatory actions and/or database availability.Practical implications: This study will contribute to the regulators (such as Financial Service Authorities/OJK) and professionals, on the effectiveness of female audit partners in improving audit quality. The study can be used as an evidence to support the gender equality in the accounting and audit industry.Social implications: Our findings suggest that auditor gender does not lead to the improvement of accruals quality in Indonesia. Given the fact that only 14% of firms in our sample audited by female audit partners, it is plausible that the positive traits of female top managers may not transmit to the overall audit process. As such, it is important to encourage more female involvement in top position of auditing and accounting industry is required to advance the profession and its positive impact to the society.Originality/value: There are no prior studies in Indonesia examining the effect of audit partner gender on accruals quality using archival data. As such, this research will be the first to document such evidence and therefore can improve our understanding on the role of auditor characteristic on audit quality. We also respond to the call from DeFond and Zhang (2014) to push analysis of audit quality to the individual auditor level by examining the gender of audit partner.

This research is motivated by the application of countercyclical policy, such as credit restructuring, by banking companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The credit restructuring that the banks carried out had the potential to affect their financial performance and increase the tendency of financial statement manipulations. The purpose of this study is to review the significance of the changes in banks’ financial performance before and after the implementation of the credit restructuring, as well as its relationship to the potential for fraudulent financial statements. The population in this study was the financial sector companies listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange in 2020, a total of 105 companies. The 96 samples consisted of 32 banking companies in the commercial banking category that have implemented countercyclical policies in the form of credit restructuring during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research method was a quantitative method using secondary data obtained from the official website of the Indonesia Stock Exchange and the official websites of the related companies. The results showed no significant change in the banks’ financial performance. Although the credit restructuring had an impact, such as a decrease in their profits, it did not encourage them to manipulate their financial statements.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put an auditor under pressure to help clients with financial reports. The objective of this research is to investigate the effect of workload and burnout on auditor performance during the COVID-19 pandemic of external auditors in Jakarta. This research employs a quantitative method with a convenience sampling approach. The sample of this study was 101 respondents from 34 public accounting firms in the Jakarta Capital Special Region that were active and registered on the website database of the Financial Services Authority (OJK). The results showed that workload had a positive effect on auditor performance while burnout has a negative effect on auditor performance. This shows that the high workload tends to affect the auditor’s motivation to improve the auditor’s performance and the high burnout tends to affect the auditor’s performance decline.

This research examined the association between executive compensation and accounting irregularities in Indonesia. Employing 1,100 firm-year observations during 2014 to 2017 period, we found that executive compensation is positively associated with accounting irregularities. This result is robust after we mitigated a serial order correlation of accounting irregularities and a self-selection bias using propensity score matching. We also discovered a positive relationship after considering alternative measures of accounting irregularities. Furthermore, we documented that the positive association between executive compensation and accounting irregularities is stronger for firms with higher board independence. Our findings provide important insights for regulators and Asian emerging market regulators who are considering promoting equity incentives for listed firms.