The Effect of Mindset, Metaphor, and Expertise Prompts on Finding Contradictory Audit Evidence

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  In Roundtable Session: Table 10: Audit Quality Indicators

Abstract

Lack of professional skepticism has been cited as a serious threat to audit quality and an underlying cause of audit failures. We investigate the relative merits of two mental primes found to improve professional skepticism: deliberative mindset and self-skeptical metaphor. We compare these primes to each other and to another prime, accounting expertise. In an experiment with 34 undergraduate Auditing students and 66 practicing auditors, we demonstrate that self-skeptical metaphor and accounting expertise prompts improve auditors’ ability to identify contradictory evidence in comparison to a deliberative mindset prompt on the warranty reserve but not the bad debt accrual. The evidence did not find any differences among primes in time expended, confidence in management’s aggressive estimate or assessment of the probability of an adjusting entry. The result hints that skeptical action may stem more from self-doubt than client-doubt, a potentially important nuance in the nudging of auditors to increased professional skepticism.

Authors

• Carol Springer Sargent, Middle Georgia State College

• Carol C. Bishop, Georgia Southwestern State University