Exploring Improvisation in Audit Work through Auditors’ Response to COVID-19

This paper explores auditors’ responses to unexpected, systematic changes in circumstances. We use the COVID-19 outbreak, a “critical incident” that disrupted all year-end audits in China, to understand this underexplored research area. Based on 24 semi-structured interviews, we first describe how COVID-19 disrupts both formal and informal aspects of audit (i.e., those documented in audit plans according to auditing standards, and those not documented in audit plans). Applying an improvisational lens, we find that in response to disruptions, auditors had to improvise by designing and executing new actions concomitantly to maintain quality and ensure timely audits: auditors modified sequence of audit process, changed format of audit procedures, and produced new behavior. We show that auditors’ improvisation is based on their mobilization of organizational memory, and we discuss consequences of auditors’ improvisation. Our findings suggest that computer-mediated communications with enhanced channels (e.g., audio or visual channels) only partially mitigate the disruption of face-to-face interactions with clients and within teams, while generating additional efforts to establish mutual understanding of files, status, and actions to be taken. Our evidence and discussion of how auditors’ improvisation changes with local versus non-local clients also provide insights regarding the role and setup of local offices