Time Pressure, Cognitive Moral Development And Dysfunctional Audit Behavior

As the behavioral agent who sustains its own profits or losses, accounting firms are facing the dual pressures of customer retention and audit quality guarantee. Due to the intense competition of audit, auditors are required to complete the planned audit tasks as soon as possible, which is the source of audit time pressure. As the detached and independent financial reporting attestation body, implementing the full audit program is a necessary measure to improve the audit quality and control the audit risks. However, because of the increasingly complex audit environment and the non-uniqueness of the audit procedure selection, the professional judgment and behavioral selection of auditors become a key factor affecting the audit cost and benefits, and the contradiction of the audit time budget and audit procedure selection is a decision-making dilemma suffered usually by auditors, which may be a major cause for the dysfunctional behavior of auditors in the audit practice. The essence is that auditors’ own short-term interests are in conflict with their long-term interests, and the audit body’s interests are in conflict with that of other stakeholders. The premise for the breakthrough of these conflicts is the awareness of the interest conflict essence by auditors, the conformation to the audit standard, and the coordination of the conflict between audit quality and time budget. If auditors are incapable of recognizing and processing these ethical dilemmas, it may induce dysfunctional audit behavior and lead to serious economic consequences, which can be seen from cases like Wanfu Biotechnology and NanTex. Therefore, based on the audit time pressure and the audit quality conflict phenomenon, the problem of dysfunctional audit behavior is studied according to the intervention of the audit time arrangement and audit procedure execution by the auditors’ individual cognitive moral development level, thus proposing a new perspective to the treatment of irregularity of auditing market.By taking 194 Chinese auditors as the survey objects, this paper attempts to exam-ine the occurrence of dysfunctional audit behavior under different time pressures with the use of situational questionnaire. The DIT proposed by Rest is adopted to measure the cognitive moral development level of auditors. Furthermore, according to the above measurement results, methods such as descriptive statistics, mean compar-ison, correlation analysis and regression analysis are used to study the relationship of audit time pressure, individual moral cognitive development, and dysfunctional audit behavior. The results show that:(1) The mean value of N2 representing the individual cognitive moral development is lower than that of similar foreign studies, which indicates that the cognitive moral development of Chinese auditors needs to be further improved compared to European and American counterparts.(2) In the audit procedure implementation process, individual cognitive moral development can suppress the occurrence of auditors’ alienation behavior.(3) Time pressure is an important reason for auditors to commit dysfunctional audit behavior in the audit procedure execution process.(4) The auditors’ cognitive moral development can reduce the dys functional audit behavior caused by time pressure in the audit procedure execution process.According to these research findings, the internal and external causes of dysfunctional audit behavior generated in the audit procedure execution process is a supplementation for the existing non-moral audit behavior. Meanwhile, facing the reform of the capital market in China nowadays, when handling the dysfunctional audit behaveor, accounting firms and relevant regulatory authorities should not only improve the supervision mechanism of audit behaviors and change the market competition pattern of audit, but also cultivate the internal moral cognitive ability of auditors, thereby inhibiting the dysfunctional audit behavior commonly. In this way, the audit quality can be enhanced, and the healthy and orderly development of China’s capital market can be guaranteed.