Engaging auditors’ innovation mindset to mitigate goal conflict and improve audit effectiveness with data analytics – thinking outside of the box

1. Goal conflict: auditors are increasingly expected to provide client insights alongside ensuring audit quality, which can reduce performance on primary audit tasks.
2. Cognitive flexibility: essential for interpreting complex data analytics outputs and maintaining professional skepticism.

The authors propose that priming an innovation mindset enhances cognitive flexibility, enabling auditors to manage competing goals and improve judgment quality. They design an experimental study to test whether creativity prompts mitigate negative effects of goal conflict and lead to better fraud risk assessments and audit procedures.

Key contributions:

• Highlights risks of conflicting goals in audits using data analytics.
• Suggests creativity interventions to strengthen auditors’ professional skepticism.
• Provides insights for regulators and firms on fostering innovation to improve audit quality.