Karla Zehms is the Ernst & Young Professor at the University of Wisconsin – Madison School of Business. She received her PhD from the University of Connecticut in 1997 and has spent her entire career at Wisconsin. She is a Wisconsin alumnus, having earned her MACC in 1991. She has been a visiting Professor at numerous other universities, including the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include auditors’ client acceptance and continuance decisions, how fraud risk and fraud brainstorming affect audit planning and audit fees, client-auditor negotiation, and audit budget-setting processes, among others. She has published over 40 papers in leading journals, including the Journal of Accounting and Economics, Accounting, Organizations, and Society, the Journal of Accounting Research, The Accounting Review, Contemporary Accounting Research, Review of Accounting Studies, and Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, among others. Professor Zehms has served on the Executive Committee of the Auditing Section of the AAA in the role of treasurer, Vice-President, President, and Past-President. She was previously an Associate Editor at Accounting Horizons and an Editor at Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory. She serves on numerous other editorial boards, both in the U.S. and internationally. She focuses her teaching in auditing, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She is also a co-author on an auditing textbook.
KEY TAKE-AWAYS
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.
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