Decisions regarding going concern opinions (GCO) are among auditors’ most important judgments, as GCOs impact the client company, financial statement users, financial markets, and auditors themselves.

Auditors have difficulties planning an audit engagement to detect their client’s fraudulent financial reporting.

In this study, we examine whether the use of an (inflexible) work program and encouraging auditors to identify value-added insights during the course of the audit impairs their judgments (i.e., fraud detection and identification of appropriate follow-up audit procedures), thereby inadvertently decreasing audit quality.

Based on two experiments, this study explores the effectiveness of using a (negative affect) instruction to improve auditor fraud detection and skepticism.

In this study the team aims at writing a literature review on going concern decisions. The study wants to update, extend what we know about going concern audit opinions. It also wants to identify whether new avenues for research can be identified.