Abstract
Errors reflect unintended deviations from plans or goals and commonly carry negative connotations. Although errors cannot be eliminated, they offer opportunities for learning and innovation. Audit firms employ powerful mechanisms, such as review processes, to prevent or detect audit errors and safeguard their work in the public interest. At the same time, the profession recognizes positive long-term outcomes of errors in terms of continuous learning to enhance auditor skills and, ultimately, audit quality. The current study employs semistructured interviews with Dutch auditors to investigate how they manage the tensions emanating from extant public and regulatory demands for flawless audits while embracing errors as opportunities for learning. Our findings reveal that auditors express a positive attitude toward openly communicating audit errors, but, in substance, they espouse negative emotions and defensive strategies for fear of repercussions. We argue that the excessive emphasis audit firms and oversight bodies place on error prevention conditions auditors into perceiving errors as negative and avoidable events. We assert these attitudes result from the profession's efforts to maintain status and legitimacy in the eyes of the public and the regulator, where any auditor error may shed doubt on auditors' work in the public interest. In sum, our findings indicate that viewing errors as incompatible with audit work makes the profession susceptible not only to repeating errors but also to missing out on opportunities to improve services and to achieve innovation.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 2696-2729 |
Number of pages | 34 |
Journal | Contemporary Accounting Research |
Volume | 39 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - Dec 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022 The Authors. Contemporary Accounting Research published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of the Canadian Academic Accounting Association.
Keywords
- audit profession
- error management
- learning from errors
- legitimacy
- psychodynamics of work
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Walking the Talk? Managing Errors in the Audit Profession*'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Datasets
-
Qualitative data for: Walking the Talk? Managing Errors in the Audit Profession
Gold, A. (Creator), Detzen, D. (Creator), van Mourik, O. (Creator), Wallage, P. (Creator) & Wright, A. (Creator), Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2022
Dataset / Software: Dataset