Internal auditors, Objectivity

Abstract The article describes an experiment that examines the effect of three audit schemes on taxpayers' joint or related decisions about the level of labor to be supplied and the amount of income to underreport in the United States. Individuals failed to report between $70 and $79 billion in federal taxes due on legal income received in 1986. This amount is equivalent to approximately 20 percent of federal income taxes due and 40 percent of the federal deficit in that year. This problem can be countered by auditing self-reported income; An audit scheme is the approach by which a taxing authority chooses the self-reports to be audited. The three audit schemes differ principally in the information used by the taxing authority to determine which self-reports of income to audit: no information is used--reports are chosen strictly at random; reported income is the basis for choosing the reports to be audited; an estimate of true income is used in addition to reported income to select audit cases. The taxpayer's labor response to the tax system may not be determined solely by the direct effect of tax rates.

Abstract ABSTRACT: Auditors' reliance on their memories vis-a-vis their reliance on external information sources such as workpapers is of practical as well as research interest. This study examined auditors' relative confidence in relying on accurate and Inaccurate recognitions of audit evidence. Each of 85 practicing auditors was asked to review a set of hypothetical audit workpapers, then after one day's delay, to respond to a recognition test and rate their confidence in their recognitions. They were asked to use the confidence rating to reflect their willingness to rely on their recognitions rather than on reviewing the workpapers or source documents again. Auditors were most confident in two cases: when they accurately recognized evidence that they had previously seen and when they confused their own Inferences with actually observed evidence. Auditors are often as confident in their Incomplete and inaccurate recognitions as they are in their accurate recognitions.

Abstract There is concern that rather than critically deliberating specific circumstances, auditors focus on selecting and documenting defensible audit positions. Currently, subordinate auditors perform tasks mindful that they will be accountable for their work both inside (e.g., partners) and outside (e.g., PCAOB) the firm and adopt “implementation intentions” based on previous review experiences to guide their performance. In the context of fraud‐detection planning, we consider an alternative approach in which subordinate auditors work under contingent reward agreements under which they will be compensated for effective fraud‐detection plans. Lacking an anticipated course of action, they invoke a “deliberative mindset” in order to create a task strategy. In an experiment, auditors completed a fraud‐detection planning task under contingent rewards, accountability, or anonymity. We find that auditors operating under contingent rewards used deliberative mindsets. They were better able to identify potential fraud, select more effective procedures, and plan more hours for effective procedures. Auditors under accountability completed the planning task based on implementation intentions. They focused on broadly increasing audit hours across procedures, including allocating significantly more hours to less effective procedures. Mediation analysis shows that improved planning performance resulted from the use of deliberative mindsets and not implementation intentions.

ABSTRACT Although lower-level auditors increasingly carry out mandatory analytical procedures (APs) in audits, they do not perform as well as partners and managers. In order to improve performance in APs by lower-level auditors, we investigated tasks requiring creativity, where training in metacognition—consciously thinking about one's thought process—improves task performance. As a result, we train lower-level auditors to use a sequential thought process comprised of two metacognitive skills: divergent thinking, where they generate explanations for unusual evidence, followed by convergent thinking, where they evaluate explanations generated and eliminate those judged infeasible. To test the efficacy of our training, we conducted an experiment with three conditions: both divergent and convergent thinking, divergent thinking only, and a control. We found that training auditors in only divergent thinking increases both the number and quality of explanations generated for an unusual situation. However, the combination of divergent and convergent thinking training leads to improved explanation generation over divergent thinking alone and, more importantly, leads to a greater likelihood of generating and choosing the correct explanation.