Table Of ContentAuditing Teams
The recent audit failures which have rocked financial markets worldwide have
accentuated the need for a better understanding of the link between risk, control
and audit quality; as well as emphasising the need to open the “black box” of the
ways auditing firms actually function. Reflecting these imperatives, Auditing Teams
unravels the organizational and management issues in audit firms that are key to
achieving effectiveness in service provision.
Specifically, this key research reflects upon the relevance and dynamics of audit-
ing teams and their impact on auditing quality, and specifically responding to the
recent claim from regulators which highlights auditing team characteristics as the
source of wide variations in quality.
By leveraging different perspectives – auditing, management accounting, organi-
zation and psychology – to investigate auditing teams and basing on evidence col-
lected from the professional world, this book will provide a unique insight into the
role of auditing teams on audit quality.
It will be of great interest to scholars and advanced students in auditing, as well
as to practitioners and regulators in the field.
Mara Cameran, PhD, is researcher of accounting at Università Bocconi and profes-
sor of SDA at the Bocconi School of Management in Milan, Italy. She is an Italian
CPA (Dottore Commercialista) and chartered auditor (Revisore Contabile), a member
of the European Auditing Research Network (EARNet) scientific committee, and
the European Accounting Association representative in the Consultative Advisory
Group (CAG) of the International Accounting Education Standards Board (IAESB).
Angelo Ditillo, PhD, is associate professor of management accounting and control at
Università Bocconi and professor of SDA Bocconi School of Management, Milan,
Italy. He has been a visiting professor in many different institutions, including the Saïd
Business School at the University of Oxford, the Iese Business School and the ESADE
Business School in Spain, the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, and the
University of Paris, Dauphine.
Angela Pettinicchio, PhD, is assistant professor and instructor of financial reporting
and International Accounting at Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy. She is a faculty
member of the Accounting, Control, Corporate and Real Estate Finance Department
and coordinator of the Financial Frauds Area of the Osservatorio di Revisione (Audit
Research Center) at the SDA Bocconi School of Management in Milan.
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Auditing Teams
Dynamics and Efficiency
Mara Cameran, Angelo Ditillo and Angela Pettinicchio
Auditing Teams
Dynamics and Efficiency
Mara Cameran, Angelo Ditillo and
Angela Pettinicchio
First published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2017 Mara Cameran, Angelo Ditillo and Angela Pettinicchio
The right of Mara Cameran, Angelo Ditillo and Angela Pettinicchio
to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cameran, Mara, 1970– author. | Pettinicchio, Angela,
1981– author. | Ditillo, Angelo, 1970– author.
Title: Auditing teams : dynamics and efficiency / Mara Cameran,
Angela Pettinicchio, Angelo Ditillo.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2017. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016056822 (print) | LCCN 2016057627
(ebook) | ISBN 9781138682702 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781315544953 (ebk) | ISBN 9781315544953 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Auditing. | Teams in the workplace.
Classification: LCC HF5667. C256 2017 (print) | LCC HF5667
(ebook) | DDC 657/.45—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056822
ISBN: 978-1-138-68270-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-54495-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
To our sons Claudio, Daniele, Emilio and Gioele,
who every day remind us about the beauty of
curiosity
Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 The management of auditing firms 4
3 Individual auditors 13
4 Auditing teams 48
5 Auditing teams control 71
6 Evidence from the field 90
7 Conclusions 115
Index 119
1 I ntroduction
The audit failures that have shocked financial markets worldwide have
accentuated the need for opening the “black box” of auditing firms’ func-
tioning. With this premise, this book has the objective to explore the audit
firms’ organizational and management issues that are key to achieve effec-
tiveness in auditing service provision. More specifically, starting from
acknowledging the knowledge-intensive nature of audit firms and illus-
trating the relevant characteristics of individual auditors, this work aims to
reflect upon the relevance and dynamics of auditing teams and their impact
on auditing quality. Our work represents a response to the recent claim from
regulators that consider audit team characteristics as particularly important:
Based on more than ten years of oversight, the Board knows that, even
within a single firm and notwithstanding firm-wide or network-wide
quality control systems, the quality of individual audit engagements
varies. PCAOB inspectors have observed a wide variation in the quality
of auditing by many engagement teams.
(PCAOB 2013: 6)
An important distinctive element of our contribution is that it leverages
on different disciplines (psychology, organization, auditing and manage-
ment accounting) to investigate audit teams, and we complement our argu-
ments with evidence collected from the professional world.
In our book, we examine the specific features of audit teams as well as
their dynamics, which matter in terms of the final performance they are able
to achieve. In particular, we analyze the impact of group characteristics,
the interaction between individuals, and the corresponding forms of control
adopted at the team level on audit quality. In fact, individual auditors do not
operate in isolation and their behaviour depends on the dynamics activated
within the audit teams in which they work.
