EFFECT OF AUDIT CHARACTERISTICS ON FIRMS PERFORMANCE AMONG SELECTED DEPOSIT MONEY BANKS IN NIGERIA

Abstract

There has been debates over the years on how audit characteristics has effect on the performance of Deposit Money Banks. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of audit characteristics on deposit banks performance in Nigeria. The study used secondary data by adopting an ex-post facto design method that used panel data from audited financial statements of selected deposit bank secondary data for the period 2011- 2020 which was purposively selected. Data was gathered from secondary sources, such as annual reports and accounts, and analysed using descriptive, correlation was used to test multicullnearity problem, and Simple linear regression was used for each of the hypothesis. The package used was Statistical Packages for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 23 for the analysis of data. Hypothesis one revealed results that audit fee (AF) has a significant negative effect on ROA (proxy for performance).Hypothesis two results imply that audit firm size (AFZ) has insignificant negative effect on ROA (proxy for performance).Hypothesis three, results imply that firm size (FZ) has a significant positive effect on ROA (proxy for performance). Hypothesis four, results imply that audit independent (AI) has a significant positive correlation with ROA (proxy for performance). It is recommended that management of deposit money banks in Nigeria should increase audit fee to improve their financial performance.