Proceedings of the International Association for Business and Society

Volume 18, 2007

Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting

Accounting for “Irregular Auditing”
An Application of the Triangle Model of Responsibility

“Irregular auditing” are actions taken by an auditor during an engagement that reduce evidence-gathering effectiveness inappropriately. The paper presents the results of an empirical study of the reasons given by auditors for their own irregular auditing. It is based on a questionnaire survey of 170 audit seniors working in Big Four audit firms in France. The study uses Schlenker’s (1997) triangle model of responsibility as the theoretical framework to analyze the respondents’ explanations of their behavior.