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Professional Skepticism

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Submitted By emmabolux
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The Role of Experience in Professional Skepticism, Knowledge
Acquisition, and Fraud Detection Recent notable instances of accounting fraud have led to regulator and public concern over the failure of experienced auditors to detect frauds prior to the issuance of a company’s financial statements. In response, the AIPCA has issued a new auditing standard, SAS 99, Consideration of Fraud in a Financial Statement Audit, in an effort to help auditors better assess fraud risk, detect fraud symptoms, and sharpen professional judgment as to whether a fraud has actually been committed in a firm. The purpose of this term paper is to examine the role of experience in increasing professional skepticism, knowledge acquisition, and ability to detect fraud. We suggest that the typical audit environment does not provide auditors with the type of experience, i.e., practice and feedback with fraud, which is necessary for successful fraud detection. Results of an experiment indicate that audit novices who have received practice and feedback with fraud detection exhibit a higher level of skepticism and knowledge about fraud and are better able to detect a fraud when it exists than individuals with typical audit experience.

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I. INTRODUCTION The apparent inability of auditors to detect financial statement fraud has prompted regulators, practitioners, and academics to examine the question, “Why do experienced auditors often fail to detect fraud?”
There are several factors that contribute to this failure. The Public Oversight
Board (POB) Panel on Audit Effectiveness suggests that one factor might be that auditors do not possess an appropriate level of professional skepticism (POB, 227 and 86). The underlying assumption is that if auditors were more skeptical (i.e., assumed a more doubtful or questioning attitude), then they would assess a higher probability that

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