This paper reports the results of a study of 81 accounting professionals whose auditing
experience took place exclusively at two different firms with markedly different levels of
formalization in their financial statement auditing processes. While professional standards impose
very similar requirements on the two firms in terms of the processes to be undertaken, as well as the
form and substantiation of the final output, the two firms differ widely in terms of decision process
formalization. These professionals participated in an experimental setting where their performance
was measured on tasks of varying complexity. While the results do not show a significant difference
in individual performance between firms for relatively routine tasks, they do show a significant
difference between firms in performance on a relatively complex task. Specifically, professionals
from firms with highly formalized decision processes perform relatively poorly when solving
complex, relatively ambiguous problems compared to those from firms with lower levels of
formalization. These results are consistent with those from studies that manipulate formalization at
the task level, which suggests that formalization can have a negative impact on individual
knowledge acquisition, integration, and application.