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.