Facilitating Audit Expertise Through Enhancing Relational Reasoning

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Abstract

This paper seeks to explicate the potential that theory and methods from relational reasoning, and associated research, have to advance the audit expertise research stream. While the paper eamines literature from psychology, it differs from a traditional literature review as it is less restricted in scope and not intended solely to summarize a specific theory or narrow research stream. Relational reasoning involves the discernment of meaningful patterns within an information stream and has been determined to be vital to expert performance (Dumas, Alexander, and Grossnickle 2013). Further, much of the knowledge learned through training or experience in auditing must be adapted before it can be applied in future circumstances, and knowledge that is more relationally structured has been shown to be more readily applied in a flexible manner. Despite this, little research based on relational reasoning literature in psychology has been performed by audit researchers. Within is a discussion regarding how theory from the core area of relational reasoning as well as closely related areas, in conjunction with methods from the naturalistic decision making paradigm of psychology, offer prospective strategies to facilitate expertise in audit domains. Also included is a discussion of how the nature of the audit environment impacts the study of expertise in audit domains.
In order to lay out the context, a brief history of audit expertise research is offered as well as a description of aspects of the audit environment that suggest relational reasoning strategies would be beneficial. This is followed by a consideration of the main tenets of the relational reasoning paradigm of psychology and then by a summary of the scant research in accounting that is based directly on these theories. Subsequently, the implications for future research on facilitating auditing expertise are explored in synchrony with future research questions, including whether or not such strategies will be effective in domains with more than minor relational complexity.
Specific future research opportunities pertain to applications of general relational reasoning research in auditing, innovations in knowledge elicitation and representation, variation in training and simulation, training in metacognition, and issues associated with distributed expertise and deskilling.

Author

• Matthew Holt, University of Central Florida