DETERMINANTS OF AUDIT FEES: EVIDENCE FROM COMPANIES LISTED IN THE INDUSTRIAL SECTOR OF MUSCAT SECURITIES MARKET

Audit means a systematic examination of books of account to check the authenticity and accuracy of transactions. It means examining the authenticity with reference to documents, invoices, vouchers, bills and cash memos. This examination is done by the auditors who are paid audit remuneration, which is an amount of money charged by them for the auditing work done. The core objective of the research is to understand some of the important elements which affect the payment of audit remuneration by the Omani companies listed in MSM. This research concentrates on five elements to determine the audit charges such as the size of the firm, profitability, audit risk, type of auditor and audit report lag. For the purpose of the study, samples were collected from 30 audit firms using secondary data for a period from 2015-2018. For this study, correlation tool was used and the results show that there is minimum relation among audit remuneration, firm’s magnitude, profitability and types of auditor; and other results reveal a negative correlation between audit risk and audit remuneration.