FAR Working Paper 2024/05 - 27: Using Field-Based Evidence to Understand the Antecedents to Auditors’ Skeptical Actions
We provide field-based evidence on antecedents to auditors’ skeptical actions, using over 600 auditors across all ranks from six audit firms as participants. We evaluate the relative importance of situational, client, and individual auditor characteristics, along with measures of auditors’ cognitive processing in relation to their self-reports of skeptical actions on one of their own audits. We find that the most important antecedents are each audit firm’s overall professional orientation, auditors’ individual feelings of accountability, their trait skepticism, their motivation to perform well on the engagement, and their intentions to behave skeptically. Auditors’ intentions are most influenced by social norms and less influenced by attitudes towards and self-efficacy about behaving skeptically. Other important antecedents include each audit firm’s quality control systems, certain individual auditors’ personality traits, their client-related industry expertise, and their audit knowledge. Our findings support various aspects of prior conceptual models and suggest ways in which audit firms can promote skeptical actions.
Authors
Kris Hardies obtained his Ph.D. from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in 2011, worked at the University of Florida in 2012 and is currently an associate professor at the Universiteit Antwerpen where he teaches accounting and auditing at the BSc and MSc level. His research interests include professional skepticism, personality and individual differences, capital markets and firm behavior, and gender inequality. His recent research focuses on the effects of personality and individual differences among auditors on audit quality. His work has been published in journals such as Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, Accounting Horizon, European Accounting Review, International Journal of Auditing, and Economics Letters.
PhD Researcher at University of Antwerp & Maastricht University
Ann Vanstraelen is Full Professor of Accounting and Assurance Services at Maastricht University and serves as Head of the department of Accounting and Information Management. She coordinates the multidisciplinary research theme "Culture, Ethics and Leadership". She earned her PhD at the University of Antwerp. Her research interests relate to the broad field of auditing and assurance services, governance, corporate reporting and disclosure, with a specific focus on the quality of accounting and auditing practices.
