The impact of extended audit tenure on auditor independence

The independence of an auditor has not only been viewed as an ethical issue within the auditing professional bodies like the International Federation of Accountants but also it is the bedrock upon which a successful audit is based. The main purpose of this study is to examine whether extended audit tenures can lead to the emergence of threats to auditor independence which will impair the auditor independence. In order to investigate our findings; we use a sample of 1,250 Swedish auditors. The data gotten was analyzed using paired samples t-test in SPSS, which compared similar situations in both short and extended audit tenures to reveal if there could be any association of auditor independence to extended audit tenures. Our findings did not reveal any strong relationship between the advocacy and familiarity threats and the impact extended audit tenures have on them, hence we rejected the hypotheses. However, though the relationship was still not strong, the actual significance levels were lower when compared to the set significance level for self-interest, self-review and intimidation threats and this enabled us to accept the respective hypotheses associated to these threats.