Auditors' perceptions of financial controller behaviours: the existence of positivity and negativity biases

Abstract

Client management forms part of a company's internal control environment. If management's honesty and competency are questionable, the audit evidence derived from its control system may also be questionable. The first study in this thesis consists of a survey that was administered to identify which factors auditors associate with the honesty and competency of client management. Factors associated with the honesty of client management are more likely to be associated with fraud risk, whereas factors associated with the competency of client management are more likely to be associated with error risk. In most cases, the auditors correctly identified the factors as being related to honesty vs competency. However, some of the fraud risk factors were classified as error risk factors. This will have impact on the scope of work of an audit. The second study is a behavioural experiment to examine the impact of client management behaviour on auditor's judgment. This is a 2 (initial honesty) x 2 (initial competency) x 2 (consistency of honesty) x 2 (consistency of competency) between-subjects design experiment. The survey in the first study serves as a means to determine what behaviours can best represent the operationalisations of honesty and competency in the experiment. The theories on impression formation particularly the category-diagnosticity theory underlie the manipulations of variables in the experiment. Both honesty and competency are tested simultaneously in the experiment. Previous studies have only examined honesty and competency in separate experiments. The findings for the experiment are not consistent for all audit assertions, and thus, there is not sufficient evidence to support the propositions in the category-diagnosticity theory. Thus, when both honesty and competency are being evaluated at the same time by auditors, their evaluation of one could have an impact on the other.