Auditors are required to understand dynamic business environments as part of the performance of analytical procedures. Prior evidence, though, suggests that auditors have difficulty understanding such environments. This study reports an experimental investigation of techniques that help auditors to identify incorrect management representations by developing expectations that are both accurate and adaptive to changing business conditions. My predictions suggest that analyzing a dynamic client environment through a systems perspective enhances information-processing ability, which then improves both evidence discrimination and the assimilation of new audit evidence. Results reveal that participants taking a holistic systems-based view of a client environment develop more coherently organized mental models that increase their likelihood of identifying management representations that are inconsistent with industry evidence. Furthermore, these participants more efficiently use their information-processing ability, thereby improving assimilation of newly learned evidence to understand how changing business conditions affect their initial expectations.

SUMMARY Critics of the legal system argue that the use of lay jurors to adjudicate auditor negligence claims results in non-meritorious decisions of auditor liability. Palmrose (2006) therefore proposes that the courts rely on panels of experienced auditors to evaluate the merits of auditor negligence claims and make recommendations to the courts. There is, however, scant evidence to indicate how auditors' and lay evaluators' judgments might differ in cases of alleged auditor negligence. Our study addresses this gap in the literature by providing theory and empirical evidence that elucidates several systematic differences between auditors' and lay evaluators' judgments. Results of an experiment indicate that auditor evaluators are less reliant on plaintiff losses as evidence than lay evaluators, but—consistent with social identity theory—experience greater empathy for auditor defendants. Consequently, auditor evaluators consistently provide lower assessments of auditor liability than lay evaluators, irrespective of audit quality. In addition, results of the experiment indicate that different legally irrelevant inputs primarily determine both auditor and lay evaluators' negligence verdicts—emotional reactions for auditor evaluators and plaintiff losses for lay evaluators. Finally, results are mixed as to whether auditor evaluators' judgments are more sensitive to varying levels of audit quality than lay evaluators' judgments.

SUMMARY In this study, I examine the conditions that moderate auditor resistance toward and susceptibility to believing client-provided lies. In particular, I predict that auditors who cannot directly refute incorrect management explanations with their own evidence-related memories are susceptible to the misinformation effect. This effect describes a phenomenon where an individual recalls false memories, based on client lies, instead of his/her own real memories. I use a laboratory experiment involving professional auditors who must compile industry-related evidence to corroborate an invalid management explanation. As expected, I find that auditors with better-developed evidence memories provide lower evaluations of management credibility and explanation sufficiency when presented with a blatantly incorrect explanation. When subsequently prompted to access the related information, auditors with poorly developed evidence memories give responses that are consistent with management-provided false memories instead of their own previously gathered evidence memories. Auditors identifying the incorrect explanation did not succumb to the misinformation effect and exhibited recall more consistent with their own evidence memories. Overall, results show that client discussion can produce a delayed effect by inducing a form of memory error when the auditors subsequently retrieve evidence stored in their memory. Data Availability: Contact the author for data availability.

The objective evaluation of evidence is imperative for audit effectiveness and the proper exercise of professional skepticism. However, numerous studies suggest that auditors fail to evaluate evidence objectively when assessing or addressing the risk of material misstatement due to fraud. We develop theory to predict that auditors do evaluate evidence objectively but only when they have stronger wise‐thinking dispositions (WTDs), a construct that is new to the audit literature. We define WTDs as the tendency of individuals to naturally engage in the balanced revision of beliefs and doubts about target phenomena by thinking openly and reflectively about evidence. We report prediction‐consistent results from two experiments that measure the strength of participants' WTDs and manipulate whether the underlying evidence is less or more indicative of fraud. The experimental results also document that auditors vary considerably in WTD strength and collectively demonstrate the reproducibility of audit judgment‐quality benefits of stronger WTDs. We further validate the WTD construct in auditing using confirmatory bi‐factor analyses to show that it has one higher‐order general factor along with several subfactors. Overall, our theory and results advance the literature by identifying WTDs as a determinant of auditors' ability to objectively evaluate evidence. In addition, our findings have implications for standard setters and audit firms as quality control standards and audit working paper review processes might benefit from revisions that take into account that auditors do not objectively evaluate evidence unless they have stronger WTDs.