Why are auditors blamed when something goes wrong? Experimental evidence
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Audit firms claim that they are used as the whipping boy when something goes wrong, either because of the public's poor knowledge of the auditing function or because financial incentives exist to blame the audit firm. An alternative explanation is that audit firms' active communication of their assurance provider role causes blaming behavior. We investigate these different explanations based on a 2 × 2 between‐subjects experiment in which we manipulate financial incentives to blame the audit firm and the audit firm's communication strategy. Three weeks in advance of the experiment we administered an auditing knowledge questionnaire to the participants to include their auditing knowledge levels into our study. We find that audit firms with “deep pockets” and an active assurance provider communication strategy receive significantly higher blame, and that poor knowledge of auditing is associated with higher blame. Furthermore, when a firm uses an assurance provider communication strategy, then it receives higher blame from participants with high (relative to low) auditing knowledge.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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 it