Auditing standards task auditors with collecting sufficient appropriate evidence to form audit judgments. Yet, cognitive psychology documents a robust finding in which people evaluate a bundle of relevant, directionally consistent evidence as though averaging the strength of the components. In consequence, a bundle of evidence may be viewed as weaker evidence than the bundle's strongest evidence item alone. We experimentally examine whether this averaging effect occurs in an audit context, and we test a potential moderator. In three independent mini‐cases, we ask auditor participants to make judgments about going concern, internal controls, and fraud risk. We present auditors with unfavorable audit evidence relevant to each judgment, manipulating whether we present a single strong evidence item or bundle it with a weaker evidence item. We also manipulate the auditor's initial impression of the client's state. We find that experienced auditors succumb to the averaging effect, making more strongly unfavorable judgments in response to the single evidence item than the bundle, and that this bias is reduced when the observed evidence is inconsistent with the auditor's initial impression. We interpret our results as consistent with the dual‐processing theory of cognition.

National office consultations (NOCs) are a mechanism intended to enhance audit quality, consistent with the logic of professionalism inherent in the audit profession. Yet research indicates that the competing logic of commercialism has become institutionalized in audit firms. We examine how the coexisting and conflicting logics of professionalism and commercialism manifest themselves in the current NOC dynamic. Specifically, we interview 22 highly experienced Big 4 audit firm partners to investigate how key actors engage in institutional work that creates, maintains, and disrupts the influence of professionalism and commercialism in NOC practices. We observe a swing of the pendulum: in the wake of SOX, audit firms adopted professionalism‐based practices which involved creating a more authoritative, “Oz”‐like national office identity, while in recent years key actors' institutional work reconfigured NOC practices and placed a renewed focus on commercialism. Our findings bring to light a number of implications that offer opportunities for future research. Although the new client‐inclusive culture aims to improve audit outcomes by encouraging consultations and fostering open dialogue with clients, it also exposes the national office to relationship‐management pressures and client‐service demands. Thus, practices developed to uphold professionalism also created a channel for commercialism‐focused practices, leading to unintended second‐order effects.