One of the aims of this paper is to see whether Barnier’s proposals to mandate audit firm rotation after
an engagement term of six consecutive years is supported by scientific evidence.
While the above described literature has mainly kept the terms “long engagements” and “short
tenures” for example trivial, there are also authors that give careful indications of how specific time
spans relate to auditor independence and audit quality. Johnson (2002) defines short term auditor –
client relationships as being two to three years and find in conclusion that financial reporting quality is
lower compared to medium length (5-9 years). Beyond nine years, Johnson (2002) finds no relative
higher or lower performance. In line with Johnson (2002), Quick and Wiemann (2011) find
significantly more earnings management in the first three years of the engagement and infer from this
that a learning curve really exists and propose that a three year period is required to accumulate
sufficient knowledge about the clients business and get quality up to a high standard (Quick and
Wiemann, 2011).
Papers that argue for mandatory firm rotation are noticeably more reluctant to actually include
a concrete number of years in their conclusions. Church et. al. (2006) for example find by weighing
costs and benefits of mandatory rotation that if the engagement period is allowed to be long enough,
mandatory rotation can be beneficial and good for audit quality. Gietzmann and Sen (2002) find
improved independence of auditors under mandatory rotation if the market is relatively thin. This
could be the case for the PIE sector as mandates are not plentiful. In particular, Gietzmann and Sen
(2002) point out that policy makers should not try to formulate one uniform answer (e.g. mandatory
auditor rotation is always good) but need to look at market circumstances among others. However,
those authors also fail to provide a term that could maximize benefits from mandatory rotation.
The EU Impact assessment paper (EC 2011c) gives several examples of an indication of a
period of ten years that could be optimal; the International Monetary Fund follows a ten year external