Fifteen years in the trenches: Auditor–client negotiations exposed and explored
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The study of auditor–client management (ACM) negotiations dates back 20 years with the publication of the first analytical model of negotiations in 1991. However, that article made next to no impact until Gibbins, Salterio and their later collaborators began a research programme on ACM negotiations in 1996. The purpose of this article is to review the 15 years of research on ACM negotiation including publishing, for the first time, the theoretical model that underlay their research programme. I then review the sequence of published articles focusing on Gibbins, Salterio and their co‐authors that led to the acceptance of the premise that the auditor co‐created the financial statements and related disclosures with client management. I call this ‘exposing the phenomena’ part of the article. I then examine the experimental research carried out over the last decade and relate it to both the underlying theoretical model and the descriptive model of ACM negotiating, identifying where research has been carried out and where important matters, both descriptively and theoretically, have received less research interest than their importance may warrant. Finally, I provide some thoughts as to how archival researchers may join into this research stream by suggesting the repurposing audit report delay construct as a measure of probability that ACM negotiations took place during the year‐end audit. Furthermore, I suggest how this delay measure might be improved using the newly popular text analysis comparison software that has recently come back in vogue in capital markets research. I call these sections ‘exploring the phenomena’. I conclude with a brief reminder about the practical significance of ACM negotiations, and I urge continued research on this important area, one that may threaten the future existence of audit firms more than any other.
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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 | 0.019 | 0.050 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".