Inherent Risk and Control Risk Assessments: Evidence on the Effect of Pervasive and Specific Risk Factors

This paper reports on a study that examines the effect of pervasive and specific risk factors on auditors' inherent risk and control risk assessments in an experimental setting. Two hypotheses concerning the significance of inherent and control risk factors on auditors' inherent risk (IR) and control risk (CR) assessments were tested by having 124 senior auditors and managers provide risk assessments on eight cases. The results show that the pervasive and specific risk factors included in the experiment were significant to both the auditors' IR and CR assessments. For the case used in this study, there was a significant positive association between auditors' IR and CR assessments. Taken together, these findings are consistent with Waller's (1993) notion of a knowledge‐based dependency between IR and CR assessments. The findings are not consistent with Kinney's (1989) reformulation of the (IR×CR) component of the audit risk model.