（2007）Audit team brainstorming, fraud risk identification, and fraud risk assessment.pdfVIP

THE ACCOUNTING REVIEW Vol. 82, No. 5 2007 pp. 1119–1140 Audit Team Brainstorming, Fraud Risk Identification, and Fraud Risk Assessment: Implications of SAS No. 99 Tina D. Carpenter University of Georgia ABSTRACT: SAS No. 99 requires brainstorming sessions on each audit to help auditors detect fraud. This study investigates audit team brainstorming sessions and the re- sulting fraud judgments. The psychology literature provides mixed results on the ben- efits of brainstorming. Results from my experiment suggest that while the overall num- ber of ideas is reduced, brainstorming audit teams generate more quality fraud ideas than individual auditors generate before the brainstorming session. Further, audit teams generate new quality fraud ideas during the brainstorming session. Results also sug- gest that audit teams’ fraud risk assessments after the brainstorming session are sig- nificantly higher than those assessments given by individual auditors on the team prior to the brainstorming session, especially when fraud is present. These results should be informative to standard setters as they suggest that brainstorming audit teams’ generation of new quality fraud ideas and their improved fraud risk assessments will likely enhance their ability to identify fraud. Keywords: fraud; brainstorming; audit teams; risk assessments. Data Availability: Contact the author. I. INTRODUCTION etecting fraud is a high priority in the audit profession. Leaders of the profession Dargue that the future demand for audits will depend largely on auditors’ ability to detect and deter fraud (Wilks and Zimbelman 2004a; Elliott 2002). Historically, the This paper is based on m