Audit-Employee Turnover, Audit Delivery, and Auditor-Client Realignment

Although the PCAOB and the Center for Audit Quality have raised concerns about the negative consequences of audit-employee turnover (PCAOB 2015, 2024; CAQ 2019), these consequences remain largely undocumented due to data limitations. We use novel data to measure how audit-employee turnover within individual offices of accounting firms explains the auditor’s ability to deliver for their clients and shapes the auditor-client relationship. We document that audit-employee turnover hampers the auditor’s ability to deliver the audit and leads to auditor realignment. Specifically, audit-employee turnover is associated with costlier, less timely, and less thorough audits that are of lower quality, which damage auditor-client relationships and lead to greater auditor switching and clients selecting auditors with lower turnover. We find that the presence of other strains to the auditor-client relationship exacerbates turnover’s link with auditor realignment. We further find that the impact of turnover varies by employee rank and when turnover occurs.