Question

Professional Skepticism of Auditors: A Cross- Cultural Experiment (Report)

financial reporting 2 subject

Answer 1

Professional Skepticism of Auditors: A Cross- Cultural Experiment

Professional Skepticism is a kind of attitude of an auditor. It is a mind set of probing questions and critical assessment of audit evidences. Most of the auditors have a temptation to ask questions about the appropriateness of the audit evidences. Skepticism is always used in every stages of audit process in order to ensure the authenticity of the information. Thus Professional Skepticism is considered as the heart of auditing.

Professional Skepticism ensures effectiveness and efficiency of audit process and thereby financial report. Nowadays there are many international companies and thereby it requires international audits. Since the countries are different in terms of culture, it is good to know whether the audit deciaions are different in different countries. Some studies have been conducted to measure whether the skepticism differs with respect to culture differences. Some studies have proved that there is significant difference in the audit decisions based on the cultural differences like shared values, norms etc. Though there are International Auditing standards, these differences occurs in the auditing process. So it is important that International Auditing standards should consider these differences.

One of the major challenge that the field of auditing faces is the uniformity in the quality of auditing worldwide. Because the accountability and risk of frauds and errors affects the skepticism. If the auditing firms can implement training programes to detect the frauds and errors uniformily the proble can be mitigated to some extent.