Abstract This paper describes an investigation of bank loan officers' (lenders') and Certified Public Accountants' (CPAs') perceptions of the assurance resulting from performance of procedures specified in CPAs' negative assurance reports. Although lenders and CPAs have varying prior probabilities of the existence of financial statement errors across client companies, the prescribed procedures approach presumes that a uniform posterior probability of undetected material errors is perceived. An alternative presumption is that each set of prescribed procedures is perceived to provide a uniform likelihood of detecting such errors. A repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) design was employed to test hypotheses related to the uniformity of perceptions across client situations and between the two subject groups. The results of this study indicate that, although the posterior probabilities are not uniform across clients for given categories of procedures, a uniform likelihood of detecting errors may be perceived. Results also indicate that some perceptual differences between lenders and CPAs exist, although these differences decrease when lenders' experience increases.
James A. Yardley (Fri,) studied this question.