مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد تمایل کارکنان حسابرس برای ارتباط با مشتریان – الزویر ۲۰۱۸

The quality of the audit process, and thus the financial statements, is dependent upon the nature of the interactions and relationship between auditors and management who create the financial statements (e.g., Arel, Brody, & Pany, 2005; Gibbins, Salterio, & Webb, 2001; Pentland, 1993; Shaub, 2004). Auditors are increasingly (and significantly) relying on computer-mediated communication (CMC) with clients and within the audit team (e.g., Baltes, Dickson, Sherman, Bauer, & LaGanke, 2002; Brazel, Agoglia, & Hatfield, 2004; Teeter, Alles, & Vasarhelyi, 2014). This study employs three sources of data to consider this complicated communication environment: interviews with audit partners; a comparative survey of audit managers/partners and audit staff; and an experiment conducted with audit staff. Semi-structured interviews with audit partners across multiple firms indicate a unanimous concern regarding the extent to which staff-level auditors are communicating with clients via CMC instead of in-person (see also Westermann, Bedard, & Early, 2015). Despite efficiency advantages to CMC, these partners express concern that by replacing face-to-face communications with CMC, younger audit staff are not developing important client relationships and are not learning how to “read” the client. Partners state that these relationships are important both for improving client service and their ability to obtain evidence. We build on these interviews and prior research by conducting a survey to compare the communication attitudes between managers/partners and audit staff. While staff and partners agree on audit staff’s use of CMC for data-gathering tasks such as requesting a list of journal entries or the minutes of a board meeting (i.e.,document requests), they have different comfort levels for using CMC (versus face-to-face (FTF) communication) regarding tasks such as asking questions about a perpetrated fraud, investigating fluctuations, or communicating a proposed adjustment to the client. We find that staff auditors are generally more comfortable using CMC in a wider variety of audit situations, which is consistent with research in contexts outside of accounting (e.g., Bergiel, Bergiel, & Balsmeier, 2008; Lipnack & Stamps, 2000). Our interview and survey findings suggest that CMC is likely being used more often and in more situations than audit firms are comfortable with. It is important to consider these findings in light of the results of two other studies. First, Bennett and Hatfield (2013) find that young auditors are often hesitant to engage older, more knowledgeable client managers in a face-to-face manner due to a social mismatch between the two parties. However, staff auditors were more likely to communicate with the client manager via email, likely due to the equalization phenomenon that occurs with CMC. Second, Saiewitz and Kida (2018) consider the other side of these interactions and find that, when the auditor uses CMC to request evidence, the client provides less evidence regarding a potential adjustment compared to a telephone or “in-person” request. While Bennett and Hatfield suggest that use of CMC increases the likelihood that young auditors will interact with older audit managers, Saiewitz and Kida suggest that the client will provide qualitatively different evidence when requests are made via CMC, thus affecting both client and auditor judgments. We add to this literature with our experiment that addresses the concern that the use of CMC may have specific limitations on the audit process.