The Role of Attitudes in Financial Audits and Directions for Future Research

Financial statement auditors play an important role in the world’s capital markets. These auditors are tasked with testing whether the client ’s financial statements , which are prepared by the client’s accounting personnel, fairly reflect the company’s financial position and performance. 1 Attitudes play an important role in determining how the audit will be conducted and thus directly impact audit quality . In particular, standard setters and regulators require that auditors maintain an attitude of professional skepticism and independence of mind throughout the financial statement audit . While standard setters have not aligned professional skepticism with the psychological attitude construct, Nolder and Kadous (2018) argue that professional skepticism can be conceptualized as an attitude, and they provide a detailed mapping of the professional skepticism construct from standards to the psychological attitude construct.