· Explore current thinking about causes and cures.

· Explore current thinking about causes and cures.

The primary goals of this project are to develop your project management techniques, integrate information from other disciplines into accounting/auditing, and provide an opportunity to enhance your research and communication skills. The secondary goal is to write an academic essay about a current auditing-related issue.

Your assignment is to make a recommendation which you believe will address the risk of audit failure.

You will need to consult a number of different sources for this paper:

· Explore the topic of “audit failure”, in professional articles and in materials released by the SEC and the PCAOB.

· Explore current thinking about causes and cures.

· Consult two or more scholarly articles, published in peer-reviewed journals which analyze causes of audit failure, effects of audit failure, audit effectiveness, the role of the auditor, psychological factors leading to audit problems, etc.

Here are some recent non-scholarly articles on “audit failure:”

After you have explored these materials, brainstorm how each of the factors they discuss might negatively impact an audit and lead to poor audit quality. Think about how these factors can relate to or cause problems for auditors; how knowledge of these aspects of psychology can impact auditors, audit firms, and regulators; possible solutions to the problems that are created by how our thinking process works; or other ISSUES related to the information brought to your attention in this article.

From your brainstorming, you should begin researching the ideas that are of most interest to you and eventually settle on a topic that you think you can enthusiastically write about AND one which you can use to develop an arguable thesis – that is one that others might be able to disagree with, but which you can support with the evidence you gather through research.

Keep in mind that your paper should not focus on a particular audit failure in the past and then analyze it in-depth.

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General Requirements for Essay

· Format should be APA, including the formatting of your manuscript, your in-text citations, and all other aspects of your paper.

Other sources have very good APA guidelines, BUT some sites discuss only formatting of in-text citations and references. You will also be graded on the overall format of your manuscript, which is covered on the Purdue OWL site.

Bibiliography / Works Cited: There is one exception I require you to make in employing the APA style. For the bibliography / list of works cited, I do not accept an urls or Digital Object Identifier (DOI) when the article in question has hard copy references available.

· Overall length should be approximately 5 pages, excluding the title page, abstract, references, and appendices. A title page, abstract, and reference list (all in APA format) are required. Appendices are optional, depending on whether they are needed for your essay.

· References MUST include at least two academic/scholarly/peer-reviewed journal articles and a minimum of four other authoritative sources. If you are unsure whether a journal is considered academic/scholarly/peer-reviewed, please refer to the following website and related links: http://library.csudh.edu/info/guides/periodicalhelp.shtml

· Be careful not to use “indirect citations.” For example, if you are citing a PCAOB auditing standard, which you found mentioned in a text or article, go to the PCAOB original document and cite that as the source. Always cite the original source, not the intermediate work which references it.