Recent professional promulgations recommend the use of audit inquiry for fraud detection. One benefit of audit inquiries is that they may induce interviewees to act in ways that facilitate the discovery of intentional financial misrepresentations (deception). We conducted two experiments to assess the ability of prospective accountants (upper-level accounting majors) to detect intentional financial misrepresentations in audit inquiries. These accounting majors served as proxies for entry-level accountants. Our results indicate that participants have poor deception detection ability in evaluating a response to an inquiry, even when they receive deception detection training prior to the inquiry, and when repeat questions are added to the inquiry to heighten the level of stress with which interviewees must cope. However, our results also suggest that the inquiry process may change the way participants view interviewees. Participants were more skeptical of verbal financial representations (e.g., valuation, existence) after they observed an inquiry regarding the representations. These results suggest that an inquiry does not significantly increase the ability of entry-level accountants to detect deception accurately, but it may benefit fraud detection by inducing a skeptical mindset for their evaluations of financial representations.

Researchers are assessing the viability of automating deception detection in TAC (text-based, asynchronous, computer-mediated) messages. Viability is conditional on whether deceivers incorporate different features in their TAC messages than truth tellers do and on whether these differentiating features support deception indicators suitable for automation. We propose that deceivers incorporate different features in their messages to realize impression-management goals. They avoid message features people associate with lying (defensive-targeted features) and include message features people associate with truth telling (promotive-targeted features). In a series of three studies, we assessed features that may be part of deceivers' impressionmanagement strategies and then assessed whether deceivers' messages contain different levels of these features than truth tellers' messages. The results show that deceivers construct different messages than truth tellers do and that the differences relate to promotive-targeted features. These findings suggest that researchers look to promotive goals of deceivers for automatable deception indicators in TAC communication.

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