Determinants of the justifiability of performance in ill-structured audit tasks

This paper examines determinants of justifiability of performance in an ill-structured audit task. Justifiability is the extent to which task performance can be defended and an ill-structured audit task is a nonroutine task that lacks definitive applicable authoritative guidance, has multiple alternative courses of action, and requires the auditor to exercise significant judgment (Abdolmohammadi and Wright [1987]). Performance evaluation for these tasks generally rests upon the perceived justifiability of either the decision process or actual choice (Davis and Solomon [1989] and Waller and Felix [1984]), so that understanding expert performance on these audit tasks requires understanding the determinants of justifiability (Solomon and Shields [1995]).

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