We collected data from two sources. One author attended an
American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) training
seminar to obtain responses from 109 auditors employed by local,
regional, and national CPA firms. We also contacted local offices of
each Big 4 firm and one national firm. From these contacts,we obtained responses from 72 auditors. 2 As shown in Table 1, participants included 181 auditors from Big 4, national, regional, and local firms from geographically different regions of the U.S. Respondents' average age was 36.5 years, with an average of 12.7 years of audit experience. 3 More than 83% of participants indicated that they had at least an intermediate level of IT expertise. Participants worked for a variety of firms; 31.1%
were employed by Big 4 firms, 17.5% by national firms, 14.7% by regional firms, and 36.7% by local firms. The highest education level for a significant majority (82.48%)was a bachelor's degree. Almost all of the respondents (97.25%) held CPA certificates. The majority of the respondents (71.0%) were male