Auditor Consideration of Tone-at-the-top in Audit Planning:

The objective of this study is to increase our understanding of the manner in which auditors integrate information about management tone-at-the-top with other information when making audit planning decisions related to extent of substantive testing. Audit planning is an area that requires considerable professional judgment and involves the evaluation and integration of a wide range of information, such as the client’s internal environment including both tone-at-thetop and internal controls, planning phase analytical procedures (PPAP), and characteristics of the client’s business and the industry in which it operates. This research provides evidence that auditors do consider tone-at-the-top during the audit planning process and that this information is integrated with other relevant factors in extent-of-substantive-testing judgments. We use a complex task (Bonner 1994; Kennedy, et al. 1997) providing cues across several dimensions, including client tone-at-the-top, results of internal control tests and PPAP, and various client characteristics to study planned extent-of-substantive-testing judgments made by auditors. One goal is to determine whether auditors integrate information about tone-at-the-top during audit planning into subsequent extent-of-substantive-testing judgments. In addition, we determine how tone-at-the-top interacts with other relevant factors in audit planning. To our knowledge, this is the first study to specifically address tone-at-the-top as a planning consideration within the audit risk model and to operationalize this variable within an experiment along with tests of controls. Previous studies operationalized internal control only as results of control tests (Cohen and Kida 1989; Dusenbury, et al. 2000), or only as control