Probabilistic Audits and Misreporting – the Influence of Audit Process Design on Employee Behavior
研究了审计流程中员工匿名性和过程透明度两个设计特征如何影响员工的虚报行为，发现非匿名审计能更有效减少虚报，且低透明度可降低匿名审计下的高虚报率。
We investigate how the design of audit processes influences employees’ reporting decisions. We focus specifically on detective employee audits for which several employees are randomly selected after a defined period to audit their ex-post behavior. We investigate two design features of the audit process, namely, employee anonymity and process transparency, and analyze their impact on misreporting. Overall, we find that both components influence the extent of individuals’ misreporting. A nonanonymous audit decreases performance misreporting more than an audit in which the employee remains anonymous. Furthermore, the high incidence of performance misreporting in the case of anonymous audits can be decreased when the process transparency is low. Thus, our study informs accountants about how the two design features of employee anonymity and transparency of the audit process can be used to constrain performance misreporting to increase the efficiency of audits.