Determinants of Audit Preparers' Workpaper Justifications
通过实验研究审计人员向有不同任务偏好的复核人证明结论时，其技术知识和隐性管理知识如何影响工作底稿中理由陈述的形式和质量。
Research indicates that justifiability of a decision is a key determinant of work quality. In this paper, we investigate whether and how the requirement for preparers to justify an audit conclusion to a reviewer with task preferences that are similar to or dissimilar from their explicitly stated initial task preferences determine the nature and extent of justifications documented in their workpapers, and how this effect is moderated by their technical and tacit managerial knowledge. Results of an experiment with auditors as participants indicate that auditors use different forms of justifications under different circumstances. Auditors with high tacit managerial knowledge and high technical knowledge have a higher proclivity to enumerate more pro versus con reasons, and to consider a wider breadth of issues when they are required to justify their conclusions to reviewers with dissimilar task preferences. In contrast, high tacit managerial knowledge auditors required to justify to reviewers with similar initial task preferences have a greater tendency to employ an evidence framing approach, in which language is used to emphasize consistent evidence by downplaying associated inconsistent evidence. In additional analyses, we find that these three specific forms of justifications are positively associated with evaluations of work quality.