Legal scholars and accounting practitioners have expressed concern that the U.S. legal system might, in cases of undetected fraud, effectively penalize auditors for identifying and investigating fraud risks (AICPA 2004; Coffee 2004; Golden et al. 2006). This study draws on counterfactual reasoning theory to provide experimental evidence indicating that this concern is warranted. Consistent with counterfactual reasoning theory, I find that evaluators in a natural (i.e., between-participants) environment are more likely to hold auditors liable for failing to detect fraud when the auditors investigated for the perpetrated fraud, relative to when the auditors did not investigate for the fraud. Findings from a less natural within-participants experiment, however, indicate that the between-participant findings likely were unintentional: That is, the same evaluators, when later asked to judge alternative levels of fraud investigation simultaneously, are less likely to hold auditors liable for failing to detect fraud when the auditors investigated for the fraud, relative to when the auditors did not investigate for the fraud.

Audit practitioners, academics, and attorneys have expressed concern that disclosing critical audit matters (CAMs) will increase jurors' auditor liability judgments when auditors fail to detect misstatements. In contrast, this study provides theory and experimental evidence that CAM disclosures, under certain conditions, reduce auditor liability judgments as jurors perceive that undetected fraudulent misstatements were more foreseeable to the plaintiff (i.e., the financial statement user suing the auditor). However, we find that CAM disclosures only reduce auditor liability for undetected misstatements that, absent CAM disclosure, are relatively difficult to foresee. Finally, CAM disclosures that are unrelated to subsequent misstatements neither increase nor reduce auditor liability judgments relative to the current regime (i.e., where CAMs are not disclosed), but reduce liability judgments relative to reporting that there were no CAMs. As such, we find that, relative to stating there were no CAMs, disclosure of any CAM (i.e., related or unrelated) provides litigation protection in cases of undetected fraud. Consequently, the CAM requirement could incentivize auditors to disclose innocuous boilerplate CAMs, thereby diluting the impact of more warranted CAM disclosures. Data Availabliity: Available from authors upon request.