Auditors’ Going Concern Decisions: Insights from Practice

This paper draws on interviews with audit professionals in the Netherlands to investigate the decision-making processes involved in assessing and reporting on audit clients’ ability to continue as a going concern. Using Actor-Network-Theory, we conceptualize these decisions as a dynamic process, involving four interrelated stages. First, partners must recognize going concern as a critical issue of the audit (problematization). Second, they enlist a variety of internal and external actors to inform the assessment (interessement). Third, these actors are coordinated and monitored in the audit team’s preliminary evaluation (enrollment). Fourth, in consultation with national office, partners complete the going concern evaluation, including audit opinion wording and approval of financial statement disclosures (mobilization). By offering an in-depth process account of auditors’ going concern decisions, our study challenges prevailing portrayals in the literature as primarily individual or mechanistic. It also offers new insights and suggestions for future research into auditor going concern decisions.