Some auditors are better than others at sniffing out when a higher risk of fraud exists and at taking steps to address it, new research from Gies College of Business shows.

Gies Professor Mark Peecher partnered with Ira Solomon (Tulane), former Gies PhD student Billy Brewster (Texas State) and current Gies PhD student Alex Johanns to coauthor the paper “Do Stronger Wise‐Thinking Dispositions Facilitate Auditors’ Objective Evaluation of Evidence When Assessing and Addressing Fraud Risk?” The paper is an open-access article in-press at Contemporary Accounting Research. 

The study answers a call from regulators, practitioners, and academics to identify auditors who are better than others at objectively evaluating and responding to evidence that increases the risk of fraud. To identify better performing auditors, it introduces wise-thinking dispositions (WTDs) to the accounting literature, along with a simple questionnaire that measures variation in the strength of auditors’ WTDs.