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How Offshoring Can Impact Novice Auditors’ Acquisition of Knowledge

Sat, October 10, 7:30 to 8:30am, TBA

Abstract

Outsourcing and offshoring have become common practice among audit firms and have introduced dynamic changes to the experiences of novice auditors. Our paper examines novice auditor performance and learning in two types of task structures common to the current audit environment: a structured task of performing accounts receivable confirmations and an ill-structured task of reviewing accounts receivable work performed by another auditor. We utilize a 2x2x2 mixed design to manipulate the task structure (structured vs. ill-structured) in a two part task, task order (whether they performed the structured task first or second) and the presence/absence of feedback. Our results show that when novice auditors perform a structured task first, they only marginally outperform novice auditors who first performed an ill-structured task. However, with a mismatched task (a second task with a different structure than the first), auditors who first performed a structured task show significant improvement in performance over auditors who first performed an ill-structured task. As predicted, we find that outcome feedback helps novice auditors who perform a structured task more than those who perform an ill-structured task. This paper contributes to both research and practice by starting the dialog about the types of experiences novice auditors encounter in the current audit environment and the impact of such experiences on their knowledge acquisition.

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