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Impact of Audit Independence and Accountability in Zamfara State Public Sector

Sani Abdullahi Shinkafi

Abstract

The study examine the impact of audit independence on the accountability of ministries in Zamfara State public sector spanning the period 2017-2023. The study uses Audit fees and audit tenure as proxies for audit independence as explanatory variables while financial reporting quality is proxy for accountability as the dependent variable while fourteen (14) ministries that were used as the sample size. This study conducted pre-regression analyses, including descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and regression analysis. The correlation results indicates that accountability exhibits a strong positive correlation with, audit tenure at coefficient value of 0.3821042 indicating that higher accountability tends to be associated with higher audit tenure . But audit fee has a weak negative correlation with accountability . The regression result revealed a significant influence of audit fees and audit tenure on accountability as indicates by their respective probability values. The findings also show that audit fee and audit tenure have positive relations with accountability in Zamfara State public sector. Based on the findings, the study recommends that the state government should implement competitive bidding processes for audit services to ensure fair and reasonable audit fees and introduce a transparent fee structure in the state to moderate excessive fees that may compromise auditor independence

Keywords

Audit IndependenceAccountabilityAudit FeesAudit Tenure

References

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