Using Field-Based Evidence to Understand the Antecedents to Auditors’ Skeptical Actions

SUMMARY We provide field-based evidence on antecedents to auditors’ skeptical actions, with participants including over 600 auditors across all ranks from six audit firms. We evaluate the relative importance of situational, client, and individual auditor characteristics, along with measures of auditors’ cognitive processing in relation to their self-reports of skeptical actions on one of their own audits. We find that the most important antecedents are each audit firm’s overall professional orientation, auditors’ individual feelings of accountability, their trait skepticism, their motivation, and their intentions to behave skeptically. Auditors’ intentions are most influenced by social norms and less influenced by attitudes toward and self-efficacy about behaving skeptically. Other important antecedents include each audit firm’s quality control systems, certain individual auditors’ personality traits, their client-related industry expertise, and their audit knowledge. Our findings support various aspects of prior conceptual models and suggest ways in which audit firms can promote skeptical actions.