The Impact of Client Strategy Content and Strategy Process
on Risk Assessment and Audit Planning
Abstract
Current risk-based audit approaches place strong emphasis on understanding the client’s industry, regulatory, and market environments using a set of techniques generally known as strategic analysis (SA). I use a behavioral experiment to investigate whether auditors who perform SA make more accurate risk assessments (i.e., assessments of the risk of material misstatement, inherent risk, and control risk) and select more effective audit procedures than auditors who do not perform SA. The results show that analyses of strategy content and/or strategy process lead to higher accuracy in assessing the risk of material misstatement at both the entity and business process level. Analysis of strategy content results in smaller deviations from the expert panel for inherent risk assessments. When auditors focus on strategy process, their assessments of the strength of the control environment are more accurate. Finally, the proportion of correctly selected audit procedures is significantly lower for the group that performed SA.