Ruiqiong (Cara) Zhang

Researcher

Ruiqiong (Cara) Zhang is a PhD candidate in Accounting at Tilburg University, where she is part of the Department of Accountancy at the Tilburg School of Economics and Management. She holds a Research Master’s degree in Business Administration and Organizational Science from Maastricht University and a Bachelor’s degree in Financial Management and English from Tianjin Foreign Studies University. Her research focuses on workload allocation within audit firms, examining how lead auditors—those responsible for managing engagement teams and signing audit reports—are assigned to clients. This work explores the determinants and consequences of allocation decisions and their implications for audit quality and auditor career development.Cara has contributed to projects investigating gender differences in workload allocation and their impact on audit quality, using large-scale empirical data and interviews with audit practitioners. Her findings provide insights into human resource management strategies in audit firms and inform best practices for improving audit quality. She teaches courses in management accounting and actively participates in research seminars and collaborative projects aimed at bridging academic research and auditing practice.

Empirical Evidence on Gender Effect and Workload Allocation in Audit Firms

In this paper, we investigate gender differences in the workload allocation process. Using a sample of 3,747 partner-year observations and 107,192 firm-year observations from Belgium, we find that female partners are associated with lower levels of workload in terms of the number of clients they serve. Our results also show that female partners audit fewer new clients. We find that the gender effect on workload is particularly strong for partners in the earlier stages of their careers. For experienced partners, we do not find gender differences in their workload, suggesting that differences between males and females in terms of workload eventually disappear. Further, we find that female auditors have clients with higher audit quality, but when controlling for workload this effect becomes smaller and even disappears in the full and Non-Big 4 sample. Our results suggest that differences in the workload allocation process can be a contributing factor to different levels of audit quality that female partners provide compared to their male counterparts. That is male auditors audit significantly more clients, which may constitute a risk factor for the audit quality they provide.

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Workload allocation process within audit firms

Context: Audit firms rely heavily on their intellectually skilled auditors, who manage and lead the engagement team (so-called ‘lead auditors’ in this project). To deliver high-quality audit services to their clients and to offer opportunity for auditors to learn, audit firms should try to achieve proper matching between their clients and the auditors based on compatibility between them. Appropriate matching can constitute a difficult exercise as both the lead auditors and clients may have an important stake that encourages them to intervene in the allocation process. Such interventions may affect the level of audit quality that the audit firm is able to deliver when clients and auditors are not appropriately matched. Objective and method: The objective of this research is to understand how audit firms determine the lead auditor-client pair in terms of appropriate matching. Given that such allocations take place in a work environment where lead auditors and clients have their own demands and as such can intervene in this process, this research further aims to identify the lead auditors’ motivations for intervening in this process. We will conduct semi-structured interviews with lead auditors and planning department staff of audit firms to address our research questions. Contribution: This research aims to open the ‘black box’ of audit firms’ human resources management strategies by zooming in on the process of lead auditor-client matching. Given the potential impact that proper matching between auditor and client has on audit quality, understanding the allocation process in terms of which auditor is assigned to which client is important to academic research and practice. Our research could give audit firms and audit regulators guidance for regulation and best practices when it comes to workload management.

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Workload allocation process in audit firms

While the allocation of human resources in audit firms is an important research topic, it has received scant research attention to date. Ideally, when audit firms aim at improving audit efficiency and effectiveness, audit firms should properly assign their clients to auditors who manage and lead the engagement team (so-called ‘lead auditors’ in this project) based on the auditor’s expertise level, industry specialization and other relevant factors that benefit audit efficiency and quality. However, lead auditors and clients alike may have their own preferences whereby they try to intervene in the allocation process. These interventions may hamper audit quality and efficiency because other factors than proper matching enter into the allocation process. Prior research on workload allocation mainly focuses on the allocation of audit hours to specific audit engagements across staff ranks and how time pressure related to audit assignments may deteriorate audit quality. Only few studies explore the workload allocation process in terms of assigning clients to lead auditors and the consequences of this assignment for audit quality. Our project focuses on a number of factors related to the allocation of lead auditors within the audit firms.

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