Industry Experience Effects and the Auditor's Judgment Performance in the Identification of Client's Business Risks and Entity-Level Controls

Abstract

We examine the effect of general, task and industry experience on auditor performance related to the identification of client’s business risks (CBR) and identification of entity level controls (ELC) in a construction company. We find the following: (1) increased general experience is only helpful in the ELC task (not the CBR task) and only at a relatively high level of experience; (2) task-experience does not have an effect on either the CBR or ELC task; and (3) industry experience is particularly relevant for the CBR task (not the ELC task) at a moderate level of experience. In general, we observe that performance on tasks where declarative knowledge is relatively more important (CBR) is improved by industry experience, while performance on tasks where procedural knowledge is relatively more important (ELC) is improved by a high level of general experience.