The Effect of the Social Mismatch between

Staff Auditors and Client Management on the

Collection of Audit Evidence

G. Bradley Bennett

University of Massachusetts

Richard C. Hatfield

The University of Alabama

THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW 

Vol. 88, No. 1 2013

pp. 31–50

ABSTRACT

• This study provides both survey and experimental evidence to consider how social interactions between staff-level auditors and client management may affect staff auditors’ perceptions and influence their decisions regarding the collection of audit evidence.
•  During fieldwork, staff-level auditors have extensive interaction with client management. Survey evidence suggests that these staff-level auditors are often ‘‘mismatched’’ with client management, in terms of their experience, age, and accounting knowledge. 
• Experimental results indicate that staff-level auditors may reduce the extent to which they collect evidence to avoid these interactions. 
• Finally, the use of email communication with client management helped to mitigate the reduction in evidence collected caused by avoiding in-person interactions. 
• Interestingly, when not collecting all the evidence, approximately half of the participants documented their findings in a vague or inappropriate manner, which would likely reduce the likelihood that reviewing auditors would identify a problem. 
• Given the extent of audit evidence collected by young staff auditors, these findings have direct implications for workpaper and audit quality.

Discussions:

This paper is a must read!

This paper highlights probably one of the biggest challenge faced by young auditors and associated behaviors that follows, though I think this problem is more severe in Asia due to our strong culture to respect people who are older than us. One trick that I normally employ to mitigate this issue of mismatch is to start from the bottom: question the lowest level staff first than move upwards to higher rank staff to confirm understanding. Normally, based on my short experience, the lower level staff is much more willing to help with our mundane questions. Anw, great paper to read! BUT please make sure you read the limitations of the paper at the conclusion section.