On Fraud and Professional Skepticism

Welcome to AccelPro Audit, where we provide expert interviews and coaching to accelerate your professional development. Today we’re featuring a conversation about professional skepticism and fraud. Our guest is Joe Brazel, Distinguished Professor of Accounting and North Carolina State University. 

Given auditors are paid by the very companies they’re supposed to be checking up on, complicated incentives are baked into the very structure of the profession. No one has yet discovered a better structure for the industry, so auditors must negotiate tricky tradeoffs from the start. How do you keep clients happy while maintaining an appropriate level of professional skepticism? When is an inconsistency or concern serious enough to warrant further investigation? And can new AI tools play a role in helping to unravel some of these knotty problems? 

These are the questions at the heart of my conversation with Brazel, who runs through what his research reveals about how audit leaders and audit committees can best encourage healthy skepticism, the promise and perils of new digital tools and the advice he always gives his students about charting their careers.

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