An area of significant importance and risk exposure during an audit of a financial institution is assessing the uncollectible portion of the client's loan portfolio. Auditing the collectibility of a commercial loan can be difficult because this complex judgment is semi‐structured and many kinds of information can be relevant. However, timely judgment process and outcome feedback are available and may improve the quality of an auditor's conclusions over time. Therefore, to test for the benefits of task‐specific experience, I compare loan judgments provided by inexperienced seniors, experienced managers, and more experienced junior partners and senior managers to a criterion based on the conclusions of senior audit partners. While previous research usually does not indicate performance improvements beyond the level of an audit senior (e.g., Tan and Libby 1997) for this complex task with timely feedback, consistent and substantial performance improvements are reported here. Auditors provided increasingly more appropriate and less biased judgments, and they achieved greater judgment consensus.
