The effect of causally related arrangements of audit evidence on the occurrence of memory conjunction errors: A study of the going concern decision.

摘要

When auditors are working on more than one client at once, they may be prone to accidentally attributing the evidence of one company to another company. One possible reason why auditors might misattribute evidence to the incorrect source company is a particular type of memory error known as memory conjunction error, which occurs when information from different sources is improperly combined in memory as originating from only one source. This study examines whether grouping going concern audit evidence from two companies according to causal connections reduces auditors' proneness to memory conjunction error. Audit evidence arranged to clearly display the causal connections among evidence items was expected to assist the auditors' memory in forming (a) distinctive representations of each company and (b) stronger bonds among the evidence items that pertain to a particular company. An experimental study, utilizing participants with auditing experience, was conducted to examine the effects of different organizational arrangements of going concern evidence on proneness to memory conjunction error. Contrary to expectations, the study results revealed that when going concern evidence was arranged according to causal connections, participants were more prone to memory conjunction error than when the going concern evidence was organized according to a traditional working paper format or randomly. The results suggest that when audit evidence is arranged in a causally relevant order, auditors are able to form distinctive representations of each company in memory but are unable to retain an accurate memory for precise evidence items.