The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether firms with qualified audit reports are more likely, than firms with unqualified audit reports, to receive qualified audit reports in the future. Furthermore, are there factors increasing or decreasing the probability of receiving qualified audit reports? The investigated factors are turnover, the number of employees, audit company, solvency, debt/equity ratio, authorized or approved accountant, and finally what kind of qualification the firms have received.

Our paper has deductive approach and the theories that have been applied are the institutional theory and the agency theory. Models have been developed, in which the theories are implemented, concerning the outcome of the audit reports for 2002 – 2003 – 2004. We have completed a document study for the realization of our purpose. 177 firms with unqualified audit reports 2002 and 172 firms with qualified audit reports were selected to participate. The results reflect the entire population of firms in Sweden.

The results of the document study have been tested with Chi-Square or Mann-Whitney. Our findings show that 55, 23 %, of the firms with qualified audit reports 2002, received qualified audit reports 2003. The firms with unqualified audit reports 2002 received in comparison 97, 18 % unqualified audit reports 2003. Based on the outcome of the audit report, a discriminated analysis shows that our factors classified 82, 20% of the firms correctly.