Type of Document	Dissertation
Author	Crook, Tamara Ann
URN	etd-12192008-092100
Title	The Influence of Internal Control Structure on Auditor Risk Assessments
Degree	Doctor of Philosophy
Department	Accounting, Department of
Advisory Committee	Advisor Name Title Gregory J. Gerard Committee Chair Jessen L. Hobson Committee Member William A. Hillison Committee Member K. Anders Ericsson Outside Committee Member
Keywords	Auditing Standard No. 5 Risk assessment Decision-making Pattern identification Auditing
Date of Defense	2008-10-28
Availability	unrestricted
Abstract Previous studies of audit task structure and auditor knowledge structure have concluded that judgment performance is improved when a match between structures exists. Auditing Standard No. 5, An Audit of Internal Control Over Financial Reporting That is Integrated with an Audit of Financial Statements (2007) (AS No. 5) establishes a top-down task structure on the audit of internal control over financial reporting. The new AS No. 5 structure, unlike most other internal control task structures, includes a hierarchical analysis of both schematically and taxonomically organized information. Prior research suggests that auditor knowledge structures of internal controls are organized both schematically by transaction flow and taxonomically by audit objective. This study investigates how an auditing task characteristic (task structure) interacts with decision maker characteristics (attention and knowledge structure) to examine whether the new AS No. 5 task structure of internal control evaluation affects governmental auditors’ processing of internal controls in three audit tasks: control risk assessment, analytic risk assessment, and pattern identification. Results indicate that auditors were better able to sort internal controls according to a traditional internal control task format as compared to the new AS No. 5 task format. However, results also suggest that in a weak control environment, the task format of AS No. 5 affected auditor ability to weight cues, as evidenced by control risk assessments and assessments of the probability of misstatement, such that risk assessments were greater in the AS No. 5 treatment than those of auditors using a categorical task structure. Finally, study findings support prior literature that suggests that as task complexity increases, auditor problem-solving ability correlates with improved decision performance.
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