Designing an Analytical Model to Determine Audit Services Fees Based on Delphi Method and Factor Analysis

This study aims to designing an Analytical Model to Determine Audit Services Fees. To this end, a combined method based on the Exploratory model (qualitative to quantitative) and Delphi and Factor Analysis methodological techniques has been used to identify and validate the effective indices and factors on pricing the audit services. The statistical society of this research, in the qualitative part, includes 30 researchers and scholars in the field of accounting and auditing, and faculty members of universities, and in the quantitative part, includes experts, consultants, and assistants working in the auditing profession, as well as researchers and university professors, from which 160 people were selected as a sample. According to the results of this study, after performing the Delphi method twice, 125 indices had a desirable and acceptable mean and were selected as effective factors to determine the professional auditing services fees by research experts. The agreement between the experts regarding these factors was 71%, which is considered desirable. Considering the results of Exploratory Factor Analysis, the studied factors can be reduced to 10, which explains up to 98% of the variance of the pricing model of the professional audit services fees. The output values obtained from AMOS software (chi-square 674.22, P-value = 0.00315, RMSEA = 0.0401) indicate that the calculated data are logically consistent with the research model, and therefore, the status factors of the audit system, organizational factors related to the auditor, auditor's personal characteristics, institutional-macro audit considerations, clients' financial considerations, institutional-managerial considerations of clients, audit risk, effectiveness and quality of audit services, ownership, governance and growth processes, and social, economic and political considerations of the audit market have a good fit and credibility to price audit services.