The acquisition of task-relevant audit knowledge

Abstract

It is widely held that the auditor's experience is the most important factor leading to the development and organization of the auditor's knowledge base (Waller and Felix 1984; Gibbins 1984). This study extends prior research by examining knowledge differences between auditors with similar amounts of public accounting experience (general domain experience) but with differing specific audit experiences and training. The study examines the association between experience and training and the auditors knowledge of the effectiveness of internal control and audit procedures to prevent and detect potential misstatements of financial statements. This particular knowledge is important in the performance of audit risk assessment and audit planning tasks. Risk assessment and audit planning tasks are important tasks that auditors begin to perform early in their auditing careers. In order to test these relationships, 60 subjects with approximately one to two years of public accounting experience performed a knowledge retrieval task to assess their knowledge of the relationship between common financial statement misstatements and the control and audit procedures that would prevent or detect those misstatements. Self-reported measures of public accounting experience and estimates of experience and training relevant to various industries and audit activities were collected to develop measures of task-relevant experience and training. The resulting evidence of this study provides limited support that differences in audit-cycle experience results in differences in the auditor's knowledge of effective internal control procedures. The study also provides evidence that the knowledge of the relationships between internal control and audit procedures and potential misstatements to financial statements is acquired, at least in part, prior to obtaining significant experience in performing audit planning tasks.