ABSTRACT
Financial statement auditors play an important role in the world’s capital markets. These auditors are tasked with testing whether the client ’s financial statements , which are prepared by the client’s accounting personnel, fairly reflect the company’s financial position and performance. 1 Attitudes play an important role in determining how the audit will be conducted and thus directly impact audit quality . In particular, standard setters and regulators require that auditors maintain an attitude of professional skepticism and independence of mind throughout the financial statement audit . While standard setters have not aligned professional skepticism with the psychological attitude construct, Nolder and Kadous (2018) argue that professional skepticism can be conceptualized as an attitude, and they provide a detailed mapping of the professional skepticism construct from standards to the psychological attitude construct.
