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Introduction

The demand for technology-fluent auditors has and will continue to grow as business operations become increasingly complex and dependent on IT (Stephan et al., 2017; Lowe et al., 2018). In addition, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) reports that technology use in audits will grow through means such as generalized audit software (GAS) (Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, 2017d), and other research notes that auditors need to respond to new legislative and professional requirements (Stoel et al., 2012; Lim et al., 2011). From this vantage, greater understanding of the benefits and integration challenges of IT capabilities, such as GAS, is important to continue examining.

To meet these challenges, financial auditors have increased their reliance upon IT auditors for some time (Brazel and Agoglia, 2007), and the role of the IT auditor has become vital to audit engagements because of complex systems and transactions (Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2011; EY, 2012; PwC, 2015). Because the financial and IT auditor relationship is a long-standing collaboration, we compare their perceptions to gain an understanding of their use of GAS. This comparison is also important given that research literature comparing IT and financial auditors is relatively sparse (Bauer and Estep, 2017).

GAS is one the most commonly used types of computer assisted audit techniques (CAAT) (Debreceny et al., 2005), but adoption has been lower than expected (Ahmi and Kent, 2013; Debreceny et al., 2005) and GAS capabilities have not been fully exploited in the audit (Janvrin et al., 2008; Kim et al., 2016). Because prior research has primarily emphasized reasons for auditors’ adoption of GAS, this leaves the relatively unexplored area of more experienced users’ perceptions of GAS, including users’ reasons for use as well as whether they believe that such use benefits the audit. This study contributes to GAS research by selecting subjects who identify as GAS users (122 financial and 66 IT auditors).

We adapt DeLone and McLean’s (D&M) (DeLone and McLean, 2003) information systems (IS) success model by including measures of specific GAS capabilities as independent variables and audit benefits as the dependent variable. The audit-related uses of GAS focused on were detecting:

  • material misstatements;

  • control deficiencies; and

  • fraud.

Expectations are that these antecedents will potentially capture...

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