Auditors’ Strategic and Conflicting Responses to CPAB Inspections: Acquiescing, Compromising, Avoiding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Based on a series of 27 semi-structured interviews conducted with audit partners and managers in Canada, our study examines how audit firms have responded and adapted to the implementation of CPAB inspections. We show that CPAB inspections have resulted in the emergence of a new and autonomous regulatory logic. This transformation has triggered an increased pattern of institutional complexity for firms revolving around three logics generating conflicting normative views and strategic prescriptions with respect to firm’s perceptions and responses to inspections: regulatory logic; commercial logic; and professional logic. Accordingly, firms attempt to balance their commitment to the inspection process through equally conflicting strategies. They acquiesce to the regulatory logic by changing organizational processes and developing the role of Quality Experts as one of their main resources in crafting and enacting firms’ compliance. They compromise between regulators’ expectations and pressure arising from the commercial and professional logics by covering the costs of inspections and negotiating inspection findings. They resist regulatory pressure through avoidance tactics, trying to conceal possible points of contention behind the production of carefully scripted relationships. Unlike studies who emphasize the strong control of the PCAOB over the inspection process, we argue that in a context of increased institutional complexity, Canadian firms benefit from a greater flexibility and repertoire of actions in their responses to CPAB inspections. The rise of Quality Experts and the emergence of a self-governing regulatory logic also constitute institutional game changers that may transform in great depth the current power structures within firms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".