Critics have accused die accounting profession of formulating audit opinions that tie highly technical and abstract. They lament dial audit opinions aw not understandable to the user and are devoid of communicative and predictive ability. This paper is aimed at addressing the above issue, m particular, it seeks to ascertain the predictive abih'ty of clean and qualified audit opinions, focusing on those 'ss-jed one year and two years prior to wihdmg up. The results give strong indications that audit opinions one year prior to failure do possess predictive value and that audit opinions do have information content.

RP 1/88

3 p.