This study examines whether perceived ethical climate of the firm, exposure to ethics and moral reasoning have an influence on the ethical judgement of auditors in Malaysia. Analysis suggests that all three factors have positive and significant influence on the ethical judgement of auditors. This study also finds that the moral reasoning of majority of the auditors in Malaysia is contained with...

and two anonymous auditors for their helpful comments. ABSTRACT Previous field research suggests that there is an increasing need for auditors to rely more extensively on enquiry based evidence. This study investigates how using various theory-and practice-based based interventions can lead to a more rigorous enquiry process. Based on psycholo gy theory on planning and on goal setting, as well ...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine whether client-specific litigation risk affects the audit quality differentiation between Big N and non-Big N auditors. Specifically, we examine whether higher quality audits of Big N auditors relative to nonBig auditors is more pronounced for clients with high litigation risk than for clients with low litigation risk. Design/methodology/approac...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that audit clients are automating more internal controls over time. Audit firms customarily respond to their clients’ increasing IT (information technology) risks by including more IT audit specialists in their external audit engagements. But, using IT audit specialists on the audit engagement to examine the IT risks that external financial statement auditors can exa...

This study investigates the relationships among industry specialist auditors, outside directors, and financial analysts. Specifically, we examine the effect of analyst coverage on the association between auditor industry specialization and outside directorship. We find that outside directors are less likely to hire industry specialist auditors for firms with high analyst coverage than for firms...

BACKGROUND The Hawthorne effect, or behaviour change due to awareness of being observed, is assumed to inflate hand hygiene compliance rates as measured by direct observation but there are limited data to support this. OBJECTIVE To determine whether the presence of hand hygiene auditors was associated with an increase in hand hygiene events as measured by a real-time location system (RTLS). ...