An investigation of auditors' decision processes in a risk assessment during the planning stage of an audit

Abstract

The study reported here was an attempt to gain insight into the decision behavior of auditors when making a risk assessment. Although acknowledged by the profession and the auditing literature as being necessary to the proper conduct of an audit, little is known about how assessments of audit risk are made. The goal of this study was to provide information about the search for and acquisition of information that leads to the assessment of risk in planning an audit. The decision setting was the planning stage in an audit of a bank holding company, and the decision made was an assessment as to the likelihood of material error in the Allowance for Loan Loss account. To develop experimental cases that were representative of planning an audit of the allowance account, extensive interviews with audit partners and managers were conducted. Factors relevant to assessing the likelihood of material error in the account were gathered, and values were assigned to the factors for each member bank of the holding company. The cases were presented to thirty-five audit managers from two accounting firms. They were to assess the likelihood of material error in the allowance account, based on the information provided. Each auditor reviewed two cases, a two-bank holding company and a four-bank company. The participants were assigned to one of two groups. One group examined holding companies whose members were similar, and the other examined member banks which were dissimilar. The information was provided on a personal computer, which served as a means of accessing the information. Using the computer enabled a record to be kept of the sequence of information selection and which information was selected. The results of the study indicated that auditors selected a subset of the available information, and the selection was made in an intradimensional manner. The search for information was relatively exhaustive within the selected subset, and search characteristics were modified between the two and four-bank cases. Consensus among the auditors was not observed for the risk assessment, but it was present in the auditors' rankings of factor importance.