Auditor Responsibility in the Context of Forward-Looking Judgments, Fraud Risk, and Evolving Stakeholder Expectations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the changing scope of auditor responsibility in light of growing reliance on forward-looking estimates, fraud risk, and stakeholder expectations. It critiques the traditional Audit Risk Model, which assumes risks are quantifiable and independent, and shows how it fails to address uncertainties in areas such as expected credit losses, goodwill impairment, and fair value assessments. In response, newer frameworks like the Performance Materiality Model offer a more integrated approach by combining audit risk with accounting risk, better aligning with the complexities of modern audits. The discussion also highlights the audit expectation gap, which is the disparity between what the public expects auditors to do and what auditing standards require. Although stakeholders increasingly expect auditors to detect fraud and anticipate business failure, the auditor’s formal role remains limited to providing reasonable assurance. Professional skepticism, though crucial, is often reduced to procedural compliance rather than being practiced as a code of conduct. The paper argues that reframing auditor responsibility requires both methodological and cultural shifts in how skepticism is exercised and communicated. Auditors must adopt more flexible risk assessment tools, actively apply skepticism, and clearly communicate their role to stakeholders. Bridging this gap is critical to maintaining public trust and the relevance of the audit profession.
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.
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 | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".