Audit Clients Want to Cooperate with their External Financial Auditor, but also Remain at Arm’s Length: a Canadian Survey Study

The objective of our research was to determine what motivates clients to cooperate while at the same time remaining independent with their financial auditors. Both cooperation (working closely) and independence (not being too close) are important in an auditor-client relationship, even though they are opposing characteristics in the Relationship Marketing literature. The problem is that an overly cooperative relationship has been considered a threat to auditor independence; and there is very little research into what would motivate audit clients to be cooperative while respecting the auditor’s need to remain independent. To help address this issue, we surveyed 1090 audit clients from Canadian corporations and our results show that audit clients want more of a value-added service from auditors including enhanced communication, resulting in a trusting and cooperative relationship with their financial auditor. Surprisingly the audit clients also want the auditor to remain somewhat distant and independent. Our results contribute to the financial auditing literature as well as to the audit practice.