The Effects of Client Identity Strength and Professional Identity Salience on Auditor Judgments
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Considerable recent audit regulation, both proposed and mandated, and accounting research has focused on auditor independence threats arising over long auditor tenure. Psychology research, however, suggests independence threats also likely arise when auditor tenure is short because auditors can quickly develop a strong client identity, raising questions about the effectiveness of mandatory audit partner or firm rotation to address independence concerns. Relying on Social Identity Theory, I examine mechanisms for promoting auditor independence that can be implemented regardless of auditor tenure or rotation. I conduct two experiments in a setting with no prior auditor-client history. As predicted, auditors who identify more strongly with their clients, by sharing their values, agree more with the client’s preferred accounting treatment, unless the salience (i.e., arousal) of their professional identity is heightened. Further, as predicted, heightening professional identity salience increases professional skepticism. My results provide an improved understanding of the joint effects of identity strength and salience on auditor judgments and suggest a cost-effective alternative to auditor rotation to maintain auditor independence, even when auditor tenure is short.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.074 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 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".