Professional accountants were selected to proxy for high general‐auditing experience, based on prior studies employing audit tasks similar to the current study (Krogstad et al., 1984; Pincus, 1991). This group comprised both auditors and non‐auditors who had been attending the final focus session in the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia program (CA program)[9], with a minimum of two years accounting experience. A majority of these participants were seniors, with an average of 20 months general‐auditing experience, being significantly greater than that of auditing students (Table I). In addition, the professional accountants have greater inventory writedown task‐specific experience than students (mean = 0.9615 vs 0.0667, respectively, based on a five‐point scale measuring the number of times they had dealt with the particular type of issue being examined).