Exploring Improvisation in Audit Work through Auditors' Responses to COVID-19

Abstract

This paper explores auditors' responses to unexpected, systematic changes in circumstances. We use the COVID-19 outbreak, a "critical incident" that disrupted all year-end audits in China, to understand this underexplored research area. Based on 24 semi-structured interviews, we first describe how COVID-19 disrupts both formal and informal aspects of audit (i.e., those documented in audit plans according to auditing standards, and those not documented in audit plans). We find that in response to disruptions, auditors had to improvise to maintain quality and ensure timely audits: auditors modified sequence of audit process, changed format of audit procedures, and produced new behavior. We show that auditors' improvisation is based on their mobilization of organizational memory, and we discuss consequences of auditors' improvisation. This paper contributes to auditing literature by introducing "improvisation" and suggesting antecedents and consequences of improvisation in the auditing context.