SUMMARY
The rise of technology-assisted analysis offers accounting firms an opportunity to enhance audit quality. To address audit staff’s resistance to those tools, firms can emphasize the sophistication of the tools as a means of encouraging adoption. This article summarizes a study by Koreff and Perreault (2023) that examines whether perceived sophistication of a tool interacts with audit supervisor preferences to affect auditors’ anticipated performance evaluation from their supervisor and evidence assessment decisions. The results suggest that, with information held constant, perceived tool sophistication and audit supervisor preferences jointly influence auditors’ anticipated performance evaluations and, in turn, evidence assessment decisions for complex accounting estimates. Thus, perceptions of data analytic tool sophistication by auditors have the potential to impact the audited financial statements to a significant degree.
JEL Classifications: M41; M42.
