FAR Vlog #1 with FAR Researcher Katlijn Haesebrouck: 'Researching the human factor in accounting'

Katlijn Haesebrouck is an assistant professor at the Department of Accounting and Information Management at Maastricht University. In this video she speaks about the FAR-project ‘The Effect of Audit Culture on Audit Quality’ she’s currently working on with Jasmijn Bol (Tulane University), Isabella Grabner (Vienna University) and Mark Peecher (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign).

Katlijn’s main interest is behavioral management accounting, which goes beyond the numbers and rather focusses on the human factor in accounting. She studies how to facilitate and influence the decision-making process within organizations. For example, what motivates employees to behave in line with the goals of an organization? Katlijn: ‘The data access via FAR is a priceless opportunity to study these questions for audit firms. For them it is of crucial importance to understand how auditors can be motivated to achieve a high level of audit quality. We will particularly be focusing on the effect of culture on audit quality and how, for example, incentives, training and competences are of importance.  A valuable research field according to Katlijn, since not much work has been done in that area, yet. 

The project includes interviews, a survey and an experiment. The interviews that have been conducted already provide some interesting insights. Katlijn: ‘It is interesting to see that there exist many similarities between big and small firms concerning culture. Most auditors are motivated to work hard and want to achieve high quality audits. Auditors state that much has changed for the good in the past 10 years. Although, they also think that there are too many checklists. But in the end, it’s the people that make the culture.’            

A literature review titled 'The Effect of Audit Culture on Audit Quality' is also available via this link.