Improving Auditors’ Review of Inconsistent Audit Evidence

SYNOPSIS We examine whether adopting a promotion focus while reviewing working papers helps audit reviewers identify more inconsistencies among evidence items relative to reviewers adopting a prevention focus. A promotion focus broadens attention and encourages big picture thinking, whereas a prevention focus has the opposite effect. We expect and find that a promotion focus is a good fit for holistically attending to inconsistencies in evidence sets, improving auditor review. Our second experiment extends the first by investigating whether a promotion focus improves responses to a segmented review structure, but we find no effects of review structure while replicating the effects of promotion focus. Further, in Experiment 2 we do not replicate the initial link in our theoretical judgment process between promotion focus and holistic thinking. Overall, our findings indicate that changing the way reviewers approach their task can improve audit quality and that additional research investigating the mechanism is needed. Data Availability: Data are proprietary and not available for sharing.