The effects of experience and explicit fraud risk assessment in detecting fraud with analytical procedures

This paper reports the results of an experiment that examined the effects of audit experience and explicit fraud risk assessment instructions on the effectiveness of analytical procedures in detecting financial statement fraud. The results of this study suggest that audit managers are more effective than audit seniors in assessing the risk of fraud with analytical procedures. Additionally, explicit fraud risk assessment instructions resulted in more effective assessments of the presence of fraud. These results have implications for the assignment of auditors to tasks and the structuring of these tasks.