The Alumni Effect and Professional Skepticism: An Experimental Investigation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SYNOPSIS Regulators consider lack of professional skepticism to be a major cause of audit deficiencies and are concerned that auditors are more willing to accommodate less conservative accounting policies in clients employing a former partner of their firm because of diminished skepticism. This study examines the impact of audit firm alumni serving as senior members of client's management on auditors' skeptical judgment. In a controlled experiment with three different conditions, audit managers assessed the potential impairment of goodwill. The results indicate that auditors are more likely to make a judgment that agrees with the client's position when the CFO is a former engagement partner from their firm, and are more confident in the CFO's position when the CFO is a former Big 4 partner, whether from their own firm or another firm, than when the CFO is not identified as having any affiliation with any audit firm. Together, these results suggest that there is an alumni effect and that the effect is also partially influenced by the differing levels of auditor's confidence in the CFO's position, as a consequence of the CFO's known or unknown affiliation with Big 4 firms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".