2023B02 - Understanding Auditors’ Reliance on Emerging Audit Technologies (Prof. dr. K. Hardies)

Why?

The overall purpose of this project is to investigate how the characteristics of decision support systems (DSS) drive auditors’ reliance on these systems. Traditionally, auditors relied on their professional judgment to select the appropriate information (audit evidence) to support their assessments. However, technological developments have substantially increased the volume and nature of available audit evidence. Therefore, auditors increasingly rely on DSS to support their decision-making. For example, auditors use DSS to aggregate data from different sources into more manageable formats. At the same time, the complexity of DSS has increased dramatically in recent times due to technological developments and the increasing diversity of available data (e.g., e-mail communication, mobile trackers, social media data). Such developments affect auditors’ willingness to rely on DSS to support their judgment and decision-making. Despite substantial investments by audit firms in new technologies, auditors generally remain hesitant to rely on such systems during the audit. Therefore, with this project, we aim to understand the mechanisms through which characteristics of DSS affect auditors’ reliance on such systems.

What?

Based on our theoretical framework, we will investigate DSS characteristics at the construct level, the heuristic level, and the interaction level of cues on information credibility, taking into account the credibility assessment of the algorithm (see Figure 1). To this end, we formulate three research objectives; one for each level of information credibility cues. More specifically, we will investigate how the following DSS characteristics influence auditors’ reliance on DSS, how these characteristics interact, and through which underlying processes.

• Research objective 1 – Construct level: DSS explainability and regulatory approval
• Research objective 2 – Heuristic level: Initial information and DSS output style
• Research objective 3 – Interaction level: DSS explainability and DSS output directiveness