The professional scepticism of internal auditors in context of fraud identification – research in the Republic of Macedonia

Abstract

In terms of global financial crises and financial scandals of big corporations worldwide, the public awareness of the responsibility of audis in detecting and preventing fraud is increasing. The interest focuses on the important role of professional skepticism and its proper application when auditing financial statements. Occuring concerns over insufficient and inadequate application of professional skepticism in audits led to development of many debates about the role of professional skepticism and suggestions on how to improve its application in the audit practice. Despite the importance of professional skepticism, in audit literature there is no consensus and empirical data for measuring the skepticism and how it affects the behavior of auditors.This paper makes an effort to define, conceptualize and measure professional skepticism. It also identifies threats to the concept and potential opportunities, ie, measures and activities to promote the application of professional skepticism throughout the audit of financial statements, in order to improve audit quality. In order to answer the question whether the possession of a certain individual level of skepticism among auditors affects their behavior towards fraud indicators during audit engagements, an experimental research, in which students and internal auditors in the Republic of Macedonia were taken as target groups, is conducted.