Accountability, task structure, and evidence evaluation in an audit review process

In the audit review process, the judgments, decisions and conclusions of an individual subordinate auditor are reviewed by other auditors at a higher level in the audit team hierarchy. This review process may induce the acceptability heuristic, in which reviewees adopt positions likely to gain the favor of reviewers. Professional auditing standards, however, require that auditors maintain unbiased, independent mental attitudes in all matters relating to audit assignments. If reviewees simply adopt their reviewers' positions, they may not be as unbiased and independent in their mental attitudes as they should be.;Audit seniors served as subjects in two experiments which tested for the acceptability heuristic. They received materials specifying the presence or absence of a review process and presenting three initial views of the reviewer for two audit tasks, one less structured and one more structured. An interaction between the initial view of the reviewer and the level of accountability was predicted for both tasks. The interactions between initial view and accountability were not significant in either experiment, indicating that subjects did not use the acceptability heuristic. However, significant results pertaining to both initial view and accountability were found for some dependent variables in the unstructured task.;The experiments also investigated evidence evaluation processes. It was hypothesized that accountability would influence the perceived importance of positive or negative items of evidence, resulting in the overweighting (underweighting) of evidence consistent (inconsistent) with the reviewer's initial view. In general, the predicted overweighting and underweighting was not found. However, accountable subjects receiving one of the views did tend to overweight positive items of evidence in the unstructured task.