Ego Depletion and Auditors' Susceptibility to Fraudulent Explanations

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I investigate whether self-control requirements in professional auditing tasks cause ego depletion, and whether depletion impacts auditors' judgment and decision-making (JDM) processes. I further examine whether task-specific experience and/or task-relevant expertise mitigates depletion. Using auditing students and professional auditors, I find that self-control requirements in two accounting tasks cause greater levels of depletion than does a depleting task from the ego depletion literature. I find that task-specific experience significantly mitigates depletion, while task-relevant expertise does so only marginally. I find that professional skepticism exacerbates depletion for domain-relevant tasks. With respect to consequences, I find that depletion increases the likelihood of accepting a CFO's fraudulent explanations for troubling financial trends. This increased susceptibility to persuasion then reduces individuals' hypothesis generation ability. Finally, I find that depletion reduces individuals' confidence in task performance. This research contributes to the literatures on auditors' JDM quality, fraud detection ability, professional skepticism, and ego depletion theory.