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Meshari O. Al-Hajri
69
SBE, Vol.20, No.1, 2017
ISSN 1818-1228
©Copyright 2017/College of Business and Economics,
Qatar University
between external audit teams and audit clients’
IA functions. In particular, rule-making bodies
can take the findings offered in this study into
account when regulating the type and extent of
external auditors’ utilization of clients’ IA staff
for a better supervision of the coordination
and interaction between external audit and IA
teams. The empirical evidence provided in this
study also calls for an increased regulatory
attention to the role and functioning of
corporate IA departments given their practical
significance to the external audit profession.
The current study is subject to a number of
worth noting limitations. First, the study’s
sample is relatively small. This was mainly
due to the lack of any publically available
data about audit fees in Kuwait, which makes
the data set used in the current study unique
in some way. Hence, future similar empirical
examination is needed to re-investigate the
IA-fees relationship using a larger sample
size, possibly when audit fees data become
publically available in the Kuwaiti market. The
use of the regression method given the low
number of cases is inevitably another limitation
of the current study. In addition, the empirical
analysis of the current study is focused on the
IA-fee relationship, with no implications made
on the possible effect of this relationship on
audit quality. Future research, therefore, should
be carried out to investigate the impact of the
IA contribution in the external audit work on
audit quality.