A comment on "Audit quality in audits of federal programs by non-federal auditors"

The recent research by Brown and Raghunandan in the September 1995 issue of Accounting Horizons (Audit Quality in Audits of Federal Programs by Non-Federal Auditors) provides valuable data on audit quality for audits of federal programs by nonfederal auditors as provided by the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency. The researchers compared audit quality in the government sector to results for peer reviews for members of the SEC Practice Section of the AICPA (SECPS), and find that audit quality is lower in the governmental sector. A comment on Brown and Raghunandan's paper argues that it is not meaningful to compare quality in the governmental sector to the private sector since the 2 environments are substantially different.