Impact of a Practical Flowcharts Approach on Educating the Control Risk Assessment

Abstract

The assessment of a control risk is a difficult task which has to be learned over the years. Experience is a good teacher in this respect. So, education guided by experience may be expected to be fruitful. The purpose of this paper is to develop practical flowcharts (PFs) to assist in educating the novices the assessment of control risk and to present the results of validation of PFs approach in classroom. The main research questions examined in the paper are: (1) how can the PFs be developed to help students and novice auditors assess the control risk? And (2) to what extent is using PFs effective as a tool to improve the education of assessing the control risk? To answer these questions, adequate field work and experiment were performed. The knowledge is acquired (a) from the literature and (b) from experienced auditors. The findings of the paper indicated that the conceptual model of PFs is successfully designed consisting of eleven submodels and ten PFs. Moreover, using a PFs approach is an effective tool to improve the education of assessing the control risk, i.e., the learning performance of students significantly improved via the PFs assignment. From the results of the validation, it may be concluded that the conceptual model of PFs provides a vital contribution to the auditing literature and the application of it constitutes a new education method of auditing.