The Effect of Stage of Development and Financial Health on Auditor Decision Behavior in the Going-Concern Task

The effect of different task settings within an industry on auditor behavior is examined for the going-concern task. Using an interactive computer process-tracing method, experienced auditors from four Big 6 accounting firms examined cases based on real data that differed on two dimensions of task settings: stage of organizational development (start-up and mature) and financial health (bankrupt and nonbankrupt). Auditors made judgments about each entity's ability to continue as a going concern and, if they had substantial doubt about continued existence, they listed evidence they would seek as mitigating factors. There are seven principal results. First, information acquisition and, by inference, problem representations were sensitive to differences in task settings. Second, financial mitigating factors dominated nonfinancial mitigating factors in both start-up and mature settings. Third, auditors' behavior reflected configural processing. Fourth, categorizing information into financial and nonfinancial dimensions was critical to understanding how auditors' information acquisition and, by inference, problem representations differed across settings. Fifth, Type I errors (determining that a healthy company is a going-concern problem) differed from correct judgments in terms of information acquisition, although Type II errors (determining that a problem company is viable) did not. This may indicate that Type II errors are primarily due to deficiencies in other stages of processing, such as evaluation. Sixth, auditors who were more accurate tended to follow flexible strategies for financial information acquisition. Finally, accurate performance in the going-concern task was found to be related to acquiring (1) fewer information cues, (2) proportionately more liquidity information and (3) nonfinancial information earlier in the process.