Reliance on decision aids: An examination of auditors' assessment of management fraud

The assessment of management fraud risk is a complex decision process, but one with which few auditors have had experience. As a result, decision aids have been suggested to support this process. Unfortunately, many times users do not rely on decision aids even when doing so would improve the quality of the decision. This paper reports on an experiment that examines the use of an expert system decision aid created to enhance the engagement of the user and increase reliance on the aid. Auditors using the expert system exhibited the ability to better discriminate between situations with varying levels of management fraud risk and selected more consistent subsequent decisions regarding appropriate audit actions than did users of a decision aid that provided only a suggested assessment, a logit statistical model. The logit model users did discriminate better than both checklist users and unaided decision makers.