Beta
132493

The Materiality Judgment Gap: An experimental study

Article

Last updated: 04 Jan 2025

Subjects

-

Tags

علوم المحاسبة وإدارة الأعمال

Abstract

Abstract:    The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has expressed concern that auditors' use of materiality allows misstatements to go uncorrected. Auditors do not require their client to correct the financial statements for immaterial misstatements. According to the professional standards, an immaterial misstatement is defined as one that has no effect on average user's decisions. However, little is known about users' materiality perceptions and what is considered to be material from user's point of view. This study investigates auditors' and users' materiality decisions by conducting three experimental cases to examine auditors' and users' assessments of materiality. Since materiality choices are not disclosed in the auditors' report or elsewhere, users of financial statements have no information as to the precision of the balances shown. Several regulations have proposed that auditor should be required to disclose his materiality threshold to users. To date, this proposal has not been enforced. This study also investigates the extent to which users of the financial statements find the disclosure of auditor materiality threshold useful. The results suggest that significantly different views of materiality exist across different cases. Understandably, users demonstrate lower materiality threshold than auditors. Materiality judgment gap does exist between auditors and users of financial statements. The results also suggest that there is a strong agreement among users with auditor materiality disclosure as a possible way to alleviate the impact of the materiality judgment gap as it facilitates users' perceptions of the accuracy of the auditor's report, and reduces overconfidence behavior in investment decision.

DOI

10.21608/zcom.2017.132493

Keywords

Key words: materiality, materiality threshold, judgment gap, materiality disclosure

Authors

First Name

مها ممدوح هاشم

Last Name

مراد

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

قسم المحاسبة، کلية التجارة، جامعة الزقازيق، مصر

Email

-

City

الزقازيق

Orcid

-

Volume

39

Article Issue

1

Related Issue

18281

Issue Date

2017-01-01

Receive Date

2020-12-26

Publish Date

2017-01-01

Page Start

3

Page End

41

Print ISSN

1110-7731

Online ISSN

2735-4512

Link

https://zcom.journals.ekb.eg/article_132493.html

Detail API

https://zcom.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=132493

Order

23

Type

تجاریة کل ما یتعلق بالعلوم التجاریة

Type Code

1,572

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

مجلة البحوث التجارية

Publication Link

https://zcom.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

The Materiality Judgment Gap: An experimental study

Details

Type

Article

Created At

23 Jan 2023