Audit Structure, Time Pressure and Judgment Accuracy: A Comparison between Strategic System Audit and Traditional Audit

The development of audit practice is a continuous process. The strategic system audit (SSA) method is a quite recent audit procedure that represents a complete shift from old audit techniques as it relies on assessing the client's business risk using a top-down rather than a bottom-up (traditional) approach. Previous studies focused on the effectiveness of SSA in performing audit. In addition, previous studies did not rule out the role of auditors' experience in an experimental procedure that compares between the two methods. Moreover, the effect of time pressure on auditors' "JDM" effectiveness under Traditional Audit (TA) and SSA during the orientation phase is still lacking in the literature. Using expert auditors as a benchmark and 81 master degree students, a2x2 factorial design experiment and a Mann-Whitney U test show that auditors under SSA method issue a more effective audit assessment than under TA in the absence or presence of time pressure.