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2020B06 – Virtual audit teamwork: Working, learning, and delivering high audit quality virtually
Project Number – 2020B06

2020B06 – Virtual audit teamwork: Working, learning, and delivering high audit quality virtually

What?

What?

The overall aim of this proposal is to assess how virtual engagement teams can deliver high-quality audits virtually. Therefore, it is necessary to get to the heart of the mechanism through which a team’s virtual nature affects audit quality.

By looking at the social and structural factors of the engagement team that vary over time and are, to a large degree, manipulable, we provide audit practitioners with insight to improve their engagement teams’ effectiveness and thus improve the quality of the services they provide. By centralizing the context of engagement teams, we ensure that our conclusions are relevant to audit practitioners. Furthermore, by conceptualizing audit quality as a process, we can identify phases in the audit process where engagement teams have been most successful at leveraging the strategic advantages associated with virtual teamwork.

Furthermore, we aim to identify circumstances where virtual teamwork might impede the engagement team’s ability to realize a high-quality audit and what might be potential mitigating strategies in these circumstances. In conclusion, the proposed research focus and methodological approach allow us to inform practitioners on which and how social and structural factors particular to virtual engagement team interact to create the conditions for these teams to perform to the best of their abilities.

Why?

Audit engagement teams operate in complex and challenging environments with deadline and budget pressures and a great responsibility towards society. Considering the challenging environment of an engagement team, audit firms make considerable investments in their employees’ technical proficiency, and leverage experienced auditors’ specific knowledge within teams to provide high-quality audits. However, in recent years the auditing profession has endured sustained criticism from regulators and public scrutiny concerning the reliability and quality of their services and the overall added value of auditing firms (MCA, 2020). The Dutch audit profession has responded to this criticism by further improving formalized work practices and established routines, investing in technology, and reinforcing the audit firm’s social context, emphasizing the socialization of norms and values related to a quality-oriented culture (AFM, 2020). In essence, the audit profession took measures to create the social and organizational context for engagement teams to be effective and perform to the best of their abilities.

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Slider: 2020B06 Wiertz Virtual Team Work
KEY TAKE-AWAYS We find that virtual teamwork offers the auditing profession strategic advantages and valuable lessons, but it also presents structural challenges. Virtual teamwork is therefore not exclusively good or bad, but it offers a firm a trade-off between advantages and disadvantages.  
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Virtual audit teamwork: Working, learning, and delivering high audit quality virtually
This practice note explores how virtual and hybrid teamwork affects audit quality, learning, and working conditions. Based on surveys of 624 auditors and interviews across six firms, the study finds that remote work offers strategic advantages such as improved audit efficiency, strong quality orientation, better work-life balance, and enhanced integrity through increased skepticism and ethical behavior. Firms also learned valuable lessons about training and social processes.
However, structural challenges persist: reduced on-the-job learning, weaker social dynamics, difficulties in training new employees, and unchanged budget and deadline pressures. First-year engagements remain particularly vulnerable in virtual settings. Auditors prefer a hybrid model, working from home about 1.6 days per week, indicating that virtual teamwork will remain a key feature of the profession.
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Team learning behaviors in virtual engagement teams
When teams are the prime unit of working and learning in organizations – such as is the case in accountancy firms – they face many challenges to use their potential and achieve their goals. Their business environment can be characterized by complexity and ambiguity. This requires teams to engage in team learning behaviors that allow team members to share their skills, knowledge, information, and point of view to modify team’s habits and work procedures depending on what is required. Understanding how team learning behaviors affect virtual engagement teams is the central research question in the FAR project “Virtual Audit Teamwork: working, learning, and delivering high audit quality virtually.” The purpose of this literature review is twofold: On the one hand, the research team aims to provide an overview of available insights on remote work and virtual teamwork in the auditing profession. On the other hand, the team strive to provide an overview of available literature on team learning behaviors in virtual teams to identify drivers and facilitate conditions of team learning in virtual teams. A systematic review of how team learning behaviors are affected by virtual teamwork is still missing, and we know little about how these insights relate to the auditing profession.  
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Project info

Project Lead

Iver Wiertz

Research team

Iver Wiertz
Dr. Therese Grohnert
Prof. dr. Wim Gijselaers
Prof. dr. Roger Meuwissen
Prof. dr. Ann Vanstraelen

Involved University

Maastricht University
Project Number – 2020B06

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