Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate practicing auditors' beliefs regarding the effect of prior involvement on the occurrence of quality threatening behaviour (QTB) during an audit. The authors examine the extent to which auditors' beliefs about QTB are consistent with the...

Purpose – This paper aims to study the effects of two different types of state skepticism prompts, as well as the effect of the trait of professional skepticism on auditor cognitive performance in a hypothesis-testing task. It examines the effect of a professional skepticism prompt, based on...

We conduct a post-implementation research analysis of AS4, a standard guiding voluntary audits of material weakness (MW) remediation disclosures, to understand the reasons for the scarcity of AS4 audits in practice. We use multiple methods (experiments, comment letter analysis, and surveys) to...

We conduct a post-implementation research analysis of AS4, a standard guiding voluntary audits of material weakness (MW) remediation disclosures, to understand the reasons for the scarcity of AS4 audits in practice. We use multiple methods (experiments, comment letter analysis, and surveys) to...

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...

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sanctioned investor-paid rating agency Egan-Jones for falsely stating that it did not know its clients' investment positions. The SEC's action against Egan-Jones raises the broad question whether knowledge of clients' investment positions creates a...

Prior research has shown that auditors who learn superiors' views before making their own judgment are influenced by them (e.g., Peecher 1996; Tan et al. 1997; Cohen and Trompeter 1998; Brown et al. 1999; Wilks 2002). We use the theory of motivated reasoning (Kunda 1990, 1999) to examine the malleability of...