Auditors experience significant problems auditing complex accounting estimates, and this increasingly puts financial reporting quality at risk. Based on analyses of the specific errors that auditors commit, we propose that auditors need to be able to think more broadly and incorporate...

Auditors must recognize problematic patterns among the assumptions underlying complex estimates to identify misstatements. Pattern recognition requires rich problem representations of complex estimates that auditors may be unable to develop given their lack of valuation expertise. I predict and...

We examine recent developments in judgment and decision making (JDM) research to provide insight into how two big ideas in this area can be leveraged as overlapping frameworks to examine and improve auditor judgment. The ideas are (1) that human thinking and reasoning can be characterized by a...