Mary B. Curtis

• PhD, MS, BSBA
• Professor at University of North Texas

Chui, Curtis, and Pike (2022) find that auditors encouraged to take a forensic specialist’s perspective provide a more effective and efficient risk response in varying fraud risk environments than with their traditional mindset. The study provides evidence that auditors can adopt the forensic perspective, which focuses on fraud detection, while mai...

Recent data breaches underscore the importance of organizational cybersecurity. However, the high costs of such security can force chief financial officers (CFOs) to make difficult financial and ethical trade-offs that have both business and societal implications. We employ a 2 × 2 randomized experiment that varies both an observed scenario CFO’s i...

Prior research finds that financial priming (thinking about money) results in leniency toward unethical activities. This research suggests that accountants, because of frequent financial priming, may be prone to overlooking unethical acts. Construal level theory research further suggests that psychologically distant events (also common in accountin...

This study examines whether priming auditors with a forensic perspective improves their fraud-risk assessments and subsequent audit-plan responses. We contribute to the literature by investigating a potential improvement in fraud detection that encourages auditors to take a forensic specialist's perspective, while retaining the audit tenets of effi...

Retaliation against whistleblowers is a well-recognized problem, yet there is little explanation for why uninvolved peers choose to retaliate through ostracism. We conduct two experiments in which participants take the role of a peer third-party observer of theft and subsequent whistleblowing. We manipulate injunctive norms (whether company policy...

This chapter seeks to elucidate the ethical and regulatory prescriptions that concern commerce and accounting, as well as the pursuit and uses of wealth, in the Qur’an. While that may seem to be a stretch, insomuch as any religion’s teachings relate to this specific business discipline, there are numerous Qur’anic lessons that deal either indirectl...

Extending prior ethics frameworks, we conduct a cross-cultural survey to examine ethical decision-making and risk taking propensity in the United States (US) and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Although there is a significant body of research describing the ethical decision-making of individuals in the US, little is known regarding those i...

Client inquiry is a foundational financial statement audit procedure. However, the literature offers little evidence regarding how auditors perform client inquiry and how note taking during client inquiry is associated with audit quality. We conduct a mixed-methods study to examine these issues. First, we conduct interviews with seven highly-experi...

Innovations in organizations often arise through the efforts of intrapreneurs—entrepreneurial-oriented employees who typically work outside of their day-to-day job responsibilities. Currently, little research has addressed this important source of innovation. Using Innovation Value Chain theory, we theorize that individual, organizational, and inno...

SYNOPSIS Advances in IT suggest that computerized intelligent agents (IAs) may soon occupy many roles that presently employ human agents. A significant concern is the ethical conduct of those who use IAs, including their possible utilization by managers to engage in earnings management. We investigate how financial reporting decisions are affected...

An increasingly common source of conflict arises from formal organizational norms regarding technology that may clash with an individual's personal norms. When formal norms are established to protect the organization, the way employees respond to such conflict can put the organization at risk. Using a sample of 225 upper-level accounting students,...

Public accounting firms can build integrity within their organizations through early detection of fraud.One way to reduce and detect fraud is to encourage whistleblowing as a prosocial behavior. We explore the impact of mentoring on intention to report fraud. A survey with 120 responses from the US public accountants suggests that quality mentoring...

Purpose This study examines how public accounting firms can use developmental mentoring to increase knowledge sharing (KS) among employees directly, and indirectly through affective organizational commitment. Design/methodology/approach The study uses a survey of public accounting professionals to elicit participants’ demographics and their perc...

Globalization defines the business world today, yet globalization also leads to many types of misunderstandings regarding ethics, motives, and trust. We apply the theory of social contracts for the purpose of aiding the understanding of moral diversity arising from globalization. Specifically, we seek to better understand how country of origin, and...

In recent years, professional skepticism (PS) has drawn extensive attention from both regulators and academics. While prior research theorizes that both stable personality traits and temporary states influence PS (e.g., Hurtt 2010; Nelson 2009), this literature tends to focus on either trait PS or contextual factors that influence judgments and beh...

Training is one of the most important factors affecting acceptance and use of technology (Venkatesh and Bala 2008). We investigate the timing of technology training as a potential intervention for auditors' resistance to use of optional technology. Appropriate timing may reduce time-related pressures, thus increasing a willingness to train when pre...

Prior research suggests both formal and informal norms influence employee behavior. While increased training is a typical recommendation to strengthen formal norms by increasing adherence to organizational codes of conduct, and therefore improve ethical behavior, there is little empirical evidence that code training actually strengthens formal norm...

Purpose – The authors aim to examine whether the well-established unified theory of acceptance and use of technology can be effectively adapted for use in an external audit setting and whether the re-specified model holds under different levels of budget pressure. Design/methodology/approach – This paper takes the form of a case study/questionnair...

In this discussion of Shafer's (J Bus Ethics, 2013, doi: 10.1007/s10551-013-1989-3) empirical research published in this issue, I raise several issues for future research. For example, I encourage ethics research to more carefully consider their use of climate versus culture, and call for an elucidation of the different characteristics of the two c...

This case presents facts and opinions gathered from personal interviews and public documents that describe how one individual discovered and reported what he perceived as accounting fraud at a large U.S. public company. George (a pseudonym), the Director of Technical Accounting Research and Training, concluded that his employer was improperly recor...

This paper investigates auditors' likelihood to report observations of colleagues' unethical behavior. We consider whether two characteristics that are particularly relevant to the audit environment, prior organizational response and power distance, affect willingness to report. Data collected from 106 senior-level auditors suggest auditors are mor...

Prior research demonstrates that knowledge of unaudited balances biases auditors' expectations during analytical procedures. What is less understood is how these biases affect auditors' subsequent investigations and their conclusions about the reasonableness of a particular balance. We employ the selective accessibility model to examine the differe...

Recently, the International Ethics Standards Board for Accountants (IESBA) solicited public comments on their proposal to revise their standard of reporting on suspected illegal acts. This commentary summarizes the contributors' views on the various alternatives proposed in the IESBA proposal entitled, Responding to a Suspected Illegal Act. The exp...

Regulators believe increased skepticism improves audit quality (e.g., PCAOB 2011; Frazel 2013), and a lack of skepticism contributes to audit deficiencies (e.g., Doty 2011a, 2011b; PCAOB 2012). Therefore, in order to achieve as great a level of professional skepticism as appropriate in each audit situation, it is important to more thoroughly unders...

To address the changing business environment and increased shareholder interest, the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) recently issued an exposure draft updating its 1992 Internal Control-Integrated Framework. We review the updated Framework and discuss the comments we (as the Environmental Scanning Committee o...

Recent financial fraud legislation such as the Dodd–Frank Act and the Sarbanes–Oxley Act (U.S. House of Representatives, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, [H.R. 4173], 2010; U.S. House of Representatives, The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002, Public Law 107-204 [H.R. 3763], 2002) relies heavily on whistleblowers for enfor...

This study examines the impact of national culture on ethical decision making. We theorize and test a mediation model where country of origin influences perceptions of justice and power distance, which in turn influence behavioral intentions in regard to ethical dilemmas. Our sample includes accounting students from four countries: China, Japan, Me...

Violations of audit standards threaten audit quality and increase litigation risk, while violations of workplace behavior lead to demoralization and employee turnover, a significant threat to CPA firms focused on attracting and retaining qualified and talented professionals. Identification of these activities can help managers understand which type...

We investigate the effects of auditor-wrongdoer reputations for performance and likeability on fellow auditors' intentions to take action in response to a questionable audit act. We also use this context to explore auditor selection of reporting outlets, when they do choose to take action. In an experiment with 181 auditors, main effects suggest th...

We employ a Layers of Workplace Influence theory to guide our study of whistleblowing among public accounting audit seniors. Specifically, we examine professional commitment, organizational commitment versus colleague commitment (locus of commitment), and moral intensity of the unethical behavior on two measures of reporting intentions: likelihood...

Public accounting firms rely on effective reporting of unethical behavior (whistleblowing) as a form of corporate governance. This study presents results from a survey of 122 in-charge level auditors, who indicated their likelihood of internal whistleblowing under three forms of identity disclosure for three independent scenarios. Reporting likelih...

This paper presents a review of extant literature examining issues relating to auditors' knowledge of and training in information systems. This review is important due to the rapidly increasing use of technology in business, recent changes in U.S. auditing standards on information technology and internal control, and signals of in-terest by regulat...

While computer-assisted audit techniques (CAATs) have the potential to increase efficiency and effectiveness of audit engagements, research in this area suggests that such techniques are under-utilized in public accounting. We propose that this condition is due to performance evaluation pressure and the use of budgets for multiple purposes, which r...

This paper summarizes the research literature related to audit firm quality control, with a dual purpose: (1) to provide information on the current state of knowledge with regard to the ways In which audit firms monitor and control firm-level risk; and (2) to identify specific areas in which there is currently insufficient research. We review liter...

In this simulation of a merger and acquisition due diligence engagement for a fast-fashion retailer's inventory account, learners develop IT audit skills by (1) preparing a business process representation, (2) identifying audit objectives for testing management assertions about inventory, (3) designing audit procedures to implement audit objectives...

This paper summarizes research related to accounting firm culture and governance. While perennially important, this topic has immediacy due to the intention of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) to consider revisions of the current U.S. interim auditing standards on quality control. Our purposes are to bring together several disp...

This paper investigates auditors' likelihood to report observations of colleagues' unethical behavior. We consider whether two characteristics that are particularly relevant to the audit environment, prior organizational response and power distance, affect willingness to report. Data collected from 106 senior-level auditors suggest auditors are mor...

The present study investigated the influence of mood on self-set goals and task performance. Results from 2 studies suggest a restricted view of mood effects in which affective state influences the level of self-set goals or task performance, but not both. Study 2 reveals asymmetrical mood effects on task performance, with positive- and negative-mo...

We demonstrated that knowledge structure training is effective in imparting transaction flow and control objective knowledge structures and that knowledge structure mediates the relationship between structure training and performance in internal control reviews. A performance degradation associated with participant-task structure incompatibility ar...

This study explores the impact of mood on individuals’ ethical decision-making processes through the Graham [Graham, J. W.: 1986, Research in Organizational Behavior 8, 1–52] model of Principled Organizational Dissent. In particular, the research addresses how an individual’s mood influences his or her willingness to report the unethical acti...

Acknowledgements: For helpful comments, the authors are indebted to editors Dan Stone and Brad Tuttle, an associate editor, and anonymous reviewers.

Conventional approaches to evaluating cognitive outcomes of training typically use paper-and-pencil tests that emphasize gains or differences in declarative knowledge. Yet a key factor in differentiating expert and novice performance is the way individuals organize their knowledge. Accordingly, the acquisition of meaningful knowledge structures and...

Knowledge structure, or the way in which individuals organize knowledge, is a separate and distinct learning outcome. Extensive prior research supports the contention that knowledge structure is a primary determinant of expertise in any professional field. Assessments of structural development can provide instructors and students with unique feedba...

Individual differences in ethical ideology are believed to play a key role in ethical decision making. Forsyths (1980) Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) is designed to measure ethical ideology along two dimensions, relativism and idealism. This study extends the work of Forsyth by examining the construct validity of the EPQ. Confirmatory factor a...

This study assesses the internal control knowledge structure dimensions and antecedents, as well as the relationship between structure and performance, for a set of computer auditors. The study extends prior research in two ways. First, in an effort to investigate the impact of multiple knowledge structures on auditor performance, a multidimensiona...

Many accounting firms have changed the way their auditors evaluate inter-nal control. Instead of preparing flowcharts documenting transaction flows, they only docu-ment the controls that have a bearing on specific financial statement assertions. This shift in documentation marks a change in the structure of the internal control evaluation task from...

The study is based on an experiment in which computer auditors used the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to evaluate automated and non-automated control procedures. The results of this exploratory analysis suggest that, in some cases, there appears to be an association between computer auditors' background and their evaluation of automated contro...

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a new technology which has many potential uses, including inventory and fixed asset tracking and control, revenue and liability recognition, and total productive maintenance. The data generated by this technology has great potential to improve manufacturing processes and management decision making. However,...

This paper explores the effectiveness of internal auditors as control mechanism over insider trading. We examine how contextual factors affect internal auditors' ethicality judgments of insider trading. We also investigate whether independent reporting structure and familiarity with insider trading laws including company policies influence internal...