INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT - Research proposal

Sustainability reporting and assurance of sustainability reports have been used by organisations in an attempt to provide accountability to their stakeholders. The percentage of organisations issuing a sustainability report has been increasing in the last few years (Junior et al., 2014). To meet the increasing demand of assurance on sustainability reports, a growing number of business entities have their sustainability reports independently assured. Although voluntary in nature, sustainability reporting and its assurance provide extra credibility regarding the clients' corporate social activities. Independent auditors as professional assurance providers of capital market have responsibility to lend credibility to financial statements and are more likely to be sensitive to any value-added behaviour and information of their clients. Therefore, sustainability assurance can provide additional information for financial statement auditors to assess their exposed audit risk. There is however, scant of evidence exploring the relationship between voluntary assurance of sustainability reports and audit fees charged by auditors to their clients.

Now, suppose you are currently working as a research analyst/manager for a large accounting firm in Melbourne. The partners of the accounting firm are concerned about above issue. In order to deepen their understanding of this issue, the partners have requested you to develop a research proposal which examines whether voluntary assurance of sustainability reports provided by Australian listed companies have any impact on audit fees charged by the auditors.

The research proposal should include the following structure:

1. An introduction and background to the above-mentioned issue. (Maximum 500 words)

2. A literature review on voluntary assurance of sustainability reports (at least 4 published academic refereed articles) and audit fees (at least 4 published academic refereed articles). For literature you have to focus on the articles published in the following three journals during last eight years (2010 to 2017): (i) The Accounting Review, (ii) Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory (iii) Journal of Business Ethics. Your literature review should provide evidence that you have carefully examined the academic refereed articles (altogether at least 4 + 4 = 8 articles), understand them, and have been able to summarise the essential content by integrating them into your own arguments and perspective. (Maximum 800 words)

3. Development of hypotheses. You have to provide logical/ theoretical reasoning to develop your hypothesis. The hypothesis has to be developed along the lines of examining the relationship between voluntary assurance of sustainability reports and audit pricing behaviour/ audit fees. (Maximum 800 words)

4. Research methods/ design, including (Maximum 700 words)
a. sources of information to be used to gather relevant data
b. sampling techniques
c. definition of variables (dependent, independent and some relevant control variables) to be used in the models
d. models to be used to examine the hypothesis/ hypotheses

5. Conclusions emphasising potential implications (Maximum 200 words)

6. References

The length of the assignment should not exceed 3,000 words (without references).