Audit Education for Future Professionals: Perceptions of New Zealand Auditors

Abstract

Audit professionals are charged with gathering evidence and expressing their opinions on the financial claims made by others. In New Zealand, as elsewhere, these opinions are relied upon for a myriad of decisions as to the economic position and operations of an organisation. The educational experience that future professionals receive in their tertiary study is important because it lays the pedagogical foundation for this role. The aim of this study is to evaluate those teaching practices, subjects and techniques that might be of value to future audit professionals. The analysis is uniquely from the perspective of the professional members who are most likely to benefit from students' experiences. The literature is used to identify relevant questions, and a survey of 360 professional auditors in New Zealand yielded a 36.4% response rate. A triangulated analysis of comments and scaled questions reveals that these professionals are concerned with communication, small business engagements and the relationships between, for example, risk and planning and independence and ethics. Findings also confirm the value of experiential and practice-informed learning and direct us to a few topics that may accommodate non-traditional teaching methods. Conclusions consider implications for teaching and future research.

Keywords:

• Audit education
• New Zealand accounting profession

Notes

New Zealand professional standards require students to take material sufficient to comprise an entire course in their tertiary study; though trends and some practices overseas would incorporate audit ‘modules’ only. For consistency purposes, this paper will use the word module to refer to tertiary audit education.

See, for example, ISA (NZ) 210 Agreeing the terms of audit engagements; ISA (NZ) 260 Communication with those charged with governance; ISA (NZ) 265 Communicating deficiencies in internal control to those charged with governance and management; ISA (NZ) 580 Written representations and the many instances in which communications are required such as to do when looking or discovering instances of fraud (ISA (NZ) 240 The auditor's responsibilities relating to fraud in an audit of financial statements) or other illegal acts (ISA (NZ) 250 Consideration of laws and regulations in an audit of financial statements). All of these are either new in 2006–2010 or have been revised to include communication issues.

A section of the survey addresses the ‘large lecture’ format, but not in a way that directly compares it to non-traditional methods.

An example of the correlation matrix can be found in Appendix II.