MK SMT 5 Ganjil-Akuntansi

Accounting and Finance 58 (2018) 315–339
The changing technological environment and the future

of behavioural research in accounting
Vicky Arnold
Kenneth G. Dixon School of Accounting, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA
Abstract
In an era where the pace of change continues to escalate, behavioural research

provides an ongoing avenue for explaining the likely effects of emergent
changes on decision-making by providers, users and assurers of accounting
information, and for providing ex ante enlightenment for policy-makers. The
purpose of this discussion is to identify contemporary changes affecting the
accounting environment, discuss the potential impact to individual and
organisational decision-making, and explore how behavioural research can
be utilised to examine these changes. Specifically, this discussion focuses on the
impact that technological changes have had on financial reporting, external
auditing and managerial accounting, with an eye towards the potential for
these changes to radically alter the future of accounting and auditing research.
Key words: Plenary speech; Behavioural accounting research; Information

technology; Technological changes in accounting
doi: 10.1111/acfi.12218
This article is based on my plenary speech at the 2013 AFAANZ Annual Conference
held in Perth, Australia. I thank both Sue Wright and David Lont, presidents of
AFAANZ, for giving me the opportunity to synthesise research on the impact of
technology on accounting, and to present that discussion in this forum. Over the past
twenty years, I have had the opportunity to work with some of the finest academics in
the world, either directly as my coauthors or indirectly through involvement in their
PhD thesis work. Most of these academics are from the AFAANZ community – people
like Stewart Leech at the University of Melbourne, Phil Collier formerly at the
University of Melbourne, Carlin Dowling formerly at the University of Melbourne,
Mohamed Elbashir and Habib Mahama both formerly at Australian National
University, Poh Sun Seow, a graduate of University of Melbourne, now at Singapore
Management University, and Jake Rose at Victoria University in New Zealand. These
people and their work have profoundly influenced my thinking and my research about
the impact of technology on the accounting domain. I would like to thank Steve Sutton
for his invaluable help in preparing both the plenary speech and writing this article.
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316 V. Arnold/Accounting and Finance 58 (2018) 315–339
1. Introduction
The traditional role of an academic, the one with whom academic freedom
was considered so necessary, is the role of being an observer and critic of
society’s behaviour and evolution. Professors have traditionally assumed the
role of the conscious of society and taken a leadership role in attempting to
critique and influence that evolution (Sutton, 2000). Among the genres of
research methods used by accounting researchers, behavioural research
facilitates this leadership role both by allowing the researcher to better
understand what is going on today and even more importantly by allowing ex
ante research to provide an understanding of what might happen in the future
based on decisions that are being made today. Behavioural methods allow the
researcher to delve into how people work, how they make decisions, what
influences their judgement and decision-making processes and how that
ultimately affects decision quality (Sutton and Arnold, 2002). Behavioural
research methods can also allow researchers to examine organisational issues in
an increasingly global, technology-driven environment.
To study what is going on today, technology cannot be ignored (Ferguson
and Seow, 2011; Cobbin et al., 2013; Sutton et al., 2016). All aspects of
accounting are impacted by the technologies that collect data as well as support
and, in many cases, guide those processes (Tee et al., 2007). In some cases,
technology completely controls the environment (Sutton et al., 2016). This
discussion focuses on how technology has reshaped the accounting and audit
environment and why researchers should recognise the importance of technol-
ogy in this environment.
As noted in the title, the purpose is to discuss the technological issues
impacting the business environment and ultimately the accounting and auditing
research environment. The common theme in the work that is highlighted
throughout this discussion is a focus on the use of behavioural research
methods and the incorporation of the impact of technology into the design and
implications of the research studies. One of the problems that I see in
behavioural accounting research is that researchers study something one time
and then do not revisit that issue again. In essence, we, as researchers, fall prey
to the biases we study – for example, we are subject to premature closure.
Conclusions are drawn on how biases are manifest in professional decision-
making environments, and assumptions are made about the environment such
as how professionals communicate with each other. Take, for example, the
audit review process. We generally fail to recognise that the technology
phenomenon has changed the underlying environment. Consider the following
examples.
In a recent visit with an audit manager, who stopped by the office wearing
jeans and an old T-shirt, he casually said that he was in the coffee shop across
the street clearing review comments and was able to drop by. When asked
about how he communicated with his audit team, the conversation proceeded
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V. Arnold/Accounting and Finance 58 (2018) 315–339 317
as follows: ‘I use instant messenger (or a form of it that is programmed in the

firm’s audit support system). Do you use text messaging? No, it is too slow. Do
you use Skype? No, I don’t want my team to see me sitting in a coffee shop in
my jeans and t-shirt’.
The key point is that the nature of communications in the audit environment
has changed. So, the question arises: How does this affect the review process?
There is a body of research that examines the review process (Trotman, 1985;
Trotman and Yetton, 1985; Owhoso et al., 2002), but most of it was conducted
several years ago. Given the technological changes that have occurred, one
should ask: Does the change in the communication process of an audit team
change the nature of the review process? Does this create a fundamental shift
that needs to be re-examined in a radically different communication environ-
ment?
Recently, one of the speakers from a Big Four firm at an AFAANZ Audit
SIG meeting broached the issue of the changes in the audit environment
resulting from changes in electronic communications. He noted that in one
audit, his firm had put video cameras in the room used by the audit team at the
client’s office to better understand interactions between the audit team and
client. A review of the videos indicated that all of the team members were
sitting at their computers typing away all day long. Communication was not
face-to-face; it was essentially all electronic even when communicating with
other team members in the same room. This is consistent with comments from
other auditors – rather than walking down the hallway, they send an email to
the client when they want to know an answer to a question. This has the
potential to radically alter the very nature of audit evidence, raising a host of
research questions. How does electronic communication alter the auditor’s
ability to assess information provided by client management and personnel?
Has the basic essence of audit evidence changed and what are the implications
to the overall aggregation and sufficiency of audit evidence?
In management accounting, massive amounts of company data are now
stored in enterprise systems, journal entry data are collected by sales clerks and
inventory clerks who scan barcodes, and data throughout the organisation are
readily available for others to see. The level of transparency has increased
dramatically, yet research is still conducted as if managers have ‘private
information’. When you talk to managers in today’s environment, they tend to
say, ‘What private information?’ The information is in our system and readily
available to anyone who can access the system. At this point, researchers may
need to ask how much of the findings from prior management accounting
research may no longer apply in today’s technology-driven business environ-
ment. We may not know what we think we know! Has technology actually
changed the management accountant’s decision frame?
The remainder of my comments will focus on three subdisciplines of
accounting: audit and assurance services, financial and managerial. While tax
generally falls under the accounting domain in the United States, it is not
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delivered the same way outside of North America (including being quite
different in Australia and New Zealand), so I will not address changes in that
area. With that said, the changes relative to tax are just as dramatic with the
infusion of tax decision aids and search engines that quickly sort through
millions of pages of tax code to find relevant information.
2. Auditing and assurance
To really understand the sophisticated changes that are ongoing in the audit
and assurance environment, researchers should understand the technologies
that are being used in the audit environment – how they influence and drive the
audit process (Seow, 2009; Curtis and Payne, 2014; Mahzan and Lymer, 2014;
Vasarhelyi and Romero, 2014; Griffin and Wright, 2015; Schneider et al., 2015;
Vasarhelyi et al., 2015). Dowling and Leech (2007) provide an excellent
background and understanding of these systems and document the function-
ality and scope of audit support systems in five of the six largest international
accounting firms in Australia. This paper provides a good understanding, at a
very basic level, of just what these systems do and the level of technology
integration into the audit process. Another important part of this new
technology is how these systems get embedded in the culture of the audit team
and how these systems are used.
Dowling (2009) examines how audit teams, the firm office and firm pressure
from the national level all come to interact and determine how these systems
are used and how integrated they become in the audit process. One of the
primary takeaways from Dowling and Leech (2007) and Dowling (2009) is a
clear movement by audit firms towards more restrictive audit support systems.
These systems take more control of the audit process and provide less flexibility
to the audit team in terms of what they do and how they perform the audit.
These systems basically remove judgement and decision-making from the audit
environment as much as possible and structure the audit process to meet the
requirements of regulators.
There are significant risks that warrant consideration by researchers as these
changes occur – downside risks that are associated with more restrictive
systems (Arnold and Sutton, 1998). When the Theory of Technology
Dominance (Arnold and Sutton, 1998) was first articulated, both researchers
and decision aid developers were suggesting that decision aids could be used to
get novice decision-makers to make decisions more like experts.1 The Theory of
Technology Dominance sets forth several propositions. First, if you give a
smart tool to a novice auditor, the theory predicts a high risk of overreliance
and overconfidence leading to potentially negative effects on decision
1
The term decision aid as used herein refers to a range of decision aiding technologies –
from simple decision aids to expert systems, and intelligent systems such as decision
support systems.
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performance. The theory argues that you need smart users to use smart
technologies. The theory also predicts that as users, particularly novice users,
become dependent on technology, they will develop an inherent laziness that
impacts their mental capabilities. They will rely on the results of the aid without
thinking about the decision. The theory further suggests that there is a high
likelihood of a strong deskilling effect – the next generation of knowledgeable
auditors will not emerge because they are too reliant on the system and do not
develop the expertise needed to further the field. Finally, there is the risk that as
firms move towards restrictive systems that force all users to perform the same
processes (in this case, force every auditor in the firm to conduct their audit in
the same way and follow the same process), a diversity of thought that is
fundamental to the evolution of better practices is stagnated. In essence, the
epistemology of auditing becomes stagnant. That is a brief overview of the
theory and the challenge becomes how to test that theory and understand what
is going on with these systems. A series of studies have been conducted that
examine the propositions of the theory.
To build on Dowling and Leech (2007) and examine the impact of restrictive
systems in decision-making, Seow (2011) examined whether the use of
restrictive systems might actually lead to poorer decision-making. He examined
the impact of restrictive vs. non-restrictive decision aids on identifying internal
control weaknesses. The results indicate that restrictive decision aid users are
much less effective at identifying internal control weaknesses, than less
restrictive decision aid users. Users of the restrictive decision aids become so
overly focused on the information prompted by the decision aid that they fail to
identify other internal control weaknesses even though they are reminded that
the list identified by the aid is not exhaustive.
One of the interesting aspects of using restrictive systems is that users of these
systems feel more empowered and more confident in their own decisions. Not
surprisingly, they like these systems because of the sense of empowerment.
Malaescu and Sutton (2015) show that novice decision-makers prefer restrictive
decision aids, whereas more experienced decision-makers find restrictive
systems cumbersome and prefer less restrictive aids. This is very troublesome
because novices are the people who need to learn the task to develop expertise.
Yet, they prefer to use systems that will do it for them. So what are the
implications of this finding to the decision quality of professionals? Does this
lead to epistemological decline in the long run?
Dowling et al. (2008) conducted a very innovative study that provides some
insight into this issue. While Dowling and Leech (2007) were researching the
use of audit support systems, Moroney (2007) was conducting a traditional
audit behavioural study looking at an audit decision-making task. Moroney’s
study utilised a pen-and-paper task for something that is normally automated
in the audit support system. Dowling, Leech and Moroney joined together and
took what they knew from two different perspectives to examine the deskilling
issue (Dowling et al., 2008). They found that participants in Moroney’s study,
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who came from firms that had been using more restrictive audit support system,
struggled with the task more than those who came from firms that used less
restrictive systems. While these results do not change Moroney’s original
findings, they do show that there is something else going on that was not
evident without stepping back to consider the technology implications. A
subsequent study by Stuart and Prawitt (2012) finds similar results in a study
focusing on formalisation of audit procedures. These results taken together
appear to indicate that users of restrictive systems develop less expertise than
those using less restrictive systems.
Testing of the Theory of Technology Dominance has also been at the core of
what is recognised as the INSOLVE project (Arnold et al., 2000, 2004a,b, 2005,
2006, 2013, 2015b). Insolvency professionals were targeted to get into a high-
risk environment with highly specialised professionals. The project had its
foundation in the extensive work completed by Leech and Collier over a 7 year
period, along with a significant amount of Australian Research Council (ARC)
Grant funding, to build a fully functional intelligent system (e.g. expert system)
that mimicked the decision processes of highly experienced insolvency
professionals (Leech et al., 1998, 1999; Collier et al., 1999). This elaborate
and well-validated intelligent system became the launch pad for a 20 year
programme of research utilising the intelligent system (and subsequent
modifications thereof) to examine the negative effects of technology on
professionals’ decision-making and ways to overcome these effects.
Arnold et al. (2004b) specifically examined order bias using 82 insolvency
seniors and staff and 85 partners and managers using the intelligent system. For
the baseline group, the findings, which were not surprising, show that bias was
present for both groups when making a decision without a decision aid. More
importantly, when the intelligent system was introduced, that bias increased for
novices using the technology (which is smarter than the user). On the other
hand, bias decreased when more experienced partners and managers used the
intelligent system. These results indicate that if experienced people are matched
with smart technology, they make better decisions. On the other hand, when a
dumb user is matched with smart technology, they make worse decisions, but
they are more confident in the decision quality. These findings are consistent
with the Theory of Technology Dominance.
This led the research team to ask the question of whether this deskilling effect
could be counteracted. Can technology be used to facilitate the development of
expertise? Arnold et al. (2006), which incorporated explanations into the
intelligent system, found that novices and experts used these systems very
differently. Novice insolvency practitioners used software-based explanations
to help them complete the task while experts focused on explanations that set
forth how the system came to its decision, presumably to reconcile any
differences between their own decision and the system’s recommendation.
While the research provides guidance on how to design systems for different
types of users, there are still concerns from a technology dominance standpoint.
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The explanations may give novices further confidence that they know what they
are doing and promote more reliance on the system, thus leading to a greater
level of technology dominance. On the other hand, with experts, the
explanations give them a way of comparing their decision to the decision
strategy of the system – allowing the intelligent system to serve as an electronic
colleague.
Arnold et al. (2015b) recently expanded on this research by automatically
providing explanations to novice users in an effort to facilitate knowledge
transfer and development of expertise. The current research explores whether
the system can be used to reshape the mental model of novice users and the way
they store information. If systems can be designed to improve the way novices
store information and perceive relationships between information cues, those
systems may be able to help move novices’ decision-making processes more
towards a decision-maker with a high level of expertise. To study this strategy,
a series of 3 day intensive training sessions were conducted. While the results
have not yet been published, the techniques applied appear to be successful and
have implications for the design of such systems (Arnold et al., 2015b). These
findings only scratch the surface of the research opportunities and needs in this
area. As advanced audit technologies continue to be deployed by audit firms,
researchers need to ask: Can systems be designed to mitigate the deskilling
effect? Perhaps even more importantly, can systems be designed to facilitate
knowledge acquisition and expertise development by the auditor?
The implementation of systems designed to facilitate the development of
expertise will be costly and the amount that firms are willing to invest to
produce knowledge transferring technologies is questionable. There is so much
that needs to be done relative to research affecting the auditing and assurance
services domain, and we have only touched the edges. Research to date
represents a series of studies that isolate specific issues (e.g. Wongpinunwatana
et al., 2000). The importance of these issues is highlighted when they are
considered in the context of Dowling and Leech (2014). This article reports the
results of a case study of one of the Big Four firms that implemented a new
version of their audit support system which is far more restrictive that the
previous system. The firm provided access to substantial archival data on the
development of the systems and the reasons for developing the system. The
authors also conducted interviews with 51 auditors and one ex-regulator to get
perspective from all levels about how the technology worked and affected their
job performance. Dowling and Leech’s work fundamentally shakes the body of
research in auditing and raises questions about the relevance today of what was
excellent audit research in its time.
For researchers conducting behavioural audit research, Dowling and Leech
(2014) is a ‘must read’ because it documents in great detail just how the audit
support system controls the audit process, automates and enforces the audit
firm methodology, structures the audit process and dictates what processes
must be completed in what order. From my perspective, this system has been
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designed to enforce a checklist mentality for adhering to minimum regulatory

requirements. The potential cost may be that auditor judgement is constrained
and that it is no longer possible to tailor an audit to a specific client (allowing
an audit to actually be of higher quality than the minimum required by
regulators). This audit support system appears to fundamentally change how
auditors perform their work, how audit team members communicate and share
information, and how the review process is conducted. The article also
highlights probably a hundred different areas that need research including the
potential deleterious effects discussed in earlier research that might arise during
an audit using this type of system.
In the earlier referenced AFAANZ Audit SIG meeting discussion by the Big
Four firm partner, one of the participants noted that one firm was trying to
standardise 80 percent of the audit process. This has significant implications for
auditing particularly given the global, technology-driven environment. If 80
percent of the audit can be standardised, fewer and fewer auditors will be
needed and outsourcing and/or offshoring will likely increase. While firms in
the United States have not been willing to say how much of the audit process
has been outsourced, they do acknowledge that they are outsourcing many
procedures (Mazza et al., 2014).
One of the reasons often cited in the practice literature for outsourcing work
offshore is that an audit firm can use more qualified auditors to conduct lower
level work leading to higher audit quality (Daugherty and Dickins, 2009). The
argument is that when work is outsourced offshore, a more experienced auditor
(such as an audit manager) might complete the work that a lower level in-house
auditor (such as a senior or even staff auditor) would normally complete. While
access to data that would provide insight into whether outsourcing leads to
higher quality would be near impossible to extract from the firms, examining
the public perception of audit quality when work is outsourced offshore is a
way to examine this issue. Lyubimov et al. (2013) examined perceptions of
quality by focusing on litigation and juror damage awards. The results indicate
that jurors perceived that outsourcing work increased risk and had a lower
expected quality level, leading the participants to award higher damages when
the work was outsourced offshore. (Just as an aside, the idea of higher quality
work is an interesting argument to consider given that often the auditors are
working in countries in which there is no reciprocal recognition of the
certification credentials from the country in which the audit is being conducted
(Lyubimov et al., 2013).)
This effect of outsourced activity is not just a public perception. Weisner and
Sutton (2015) used an alternative approach to examine auditors’ perceptions of
the quality of offshored work. In their scenario, an outsourcing IT auditor
working for a client had identical credentials (and name) across all experi-
mental conditions. But, when the internal IT auditor (who was globally
certified) was located in India, the external auditor placed less reliance on his
work and was less willing to use the internal auditor’s work than when the
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outsourced audit work was completed by a similarly credentialed domestic

outsourcer–an irony when the audit firms’ public arguments are that work is
offshored by the major audit firms to increase quality.
The next wave of automated audit technologies promises to have an even
greater impact on the use of expert human auditors, and more importantly the
development of new expert human auditors. This next wave is being driven
largely by a focus on the use of data analytics and big data (Brown-Liburd
et al., 2015; Cao et al., 2015; Griffin and Wright, 2015; Vasarhelyi et al., 2015;
and Yoon et al., 2015), the economic forces that are pushing for this data
analysis capability to ‘make the audit more efficient’ (Alles, 2015), and the
perceived ability of automated data analytics to solve many of the human
bottlenecks in continuous auditing (Zhang et al., 2015). Underlying all of these
advances is a systematic effort to improve auditing by automating and
alleviating the deficiencies of human judgement. The extensive use of artificial
intelligence in emerging audit technologies has the potential to bring to reality
some of the most concerning propositions in the Theory of Technology
Dominance, and research on the implications of artificial intelligence use in the
audit environment is arguably more critical now than at any time before
(Sutton et al., 2016).
While significant changes in the audit process and the manner in which audits
are conducted are occurring as a result of technology, it is not the only area of
accounting that technology is affecting. Behavioural auditing research is
particularly interesting and insightful because it consists of professional
decision-makers in a fairly homogenous decision environment. That is not
the case in behavioural financial research as the decision-makers are a very
eclectic group that includes professional analysts that are highly specialised and
non-professional investors sometimes with little or no training in financial
analysis.
3. Behavioural financial accounting research
There is a rapidly growing body of research in behavioural financial

accounting examining the mechanisms for delivery of accounting information
and the impact that information has on investors’ decisions. Research seems to
be focused on content issues (e.g. what information is reported and does it
make a difference in decisions), rather than the technology related issues of how
information is reported and what are the implications for regulators. The
primary questions seem to be, ‘If information is disclosed, will investors use it
or do they care about it?’
One area of research that is just starting to garner attention is the delivery
mechanism and the impact of the delivery mechanism on decision-making.
Looking at the use of technology from a user perspective, Richardson et al.
(2012) recently published the results of a study to examine how non-
professional investors’ decisions are affected by the speed of online trading
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and if a decision aid could mitigate negative effects. The findings indicate that
rapid speed of the electronic trading system has a negative effect on decisions,
but the use of decision aiding technology can mitigate the effect of making
quick decisions in an online trading system. The implication is that new
decision aiding technology is needed to cope with the technologically advanced
delivery system.
The current reporting model assumes that investors are patiently waiting for
quarterly reports and annual reports along with accompanying earnings
announcements, but one must question whether that is really the case. For
example, if I want to know the weather forecast for tomorrow, I do not wait
until the news comes on; I pick up my smartphone, click on my weather app
and immediately know what the weather will be anywhere in the world.
Technology has changed the way in which people access and use information;
thus, changes in the reporting model that reflect the technology-driven,
immediate information world that exists today need to be forthcoming.
Companies certainly appear to be preparing for much quicker closing of their
books and more immediate information dissemination (Janvrin and Mascha,
2014).
A move is underway to make financial information more readily available to
users (Sun et al., 2015). The global adoption of tagged data formats such as
eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) and Standard Business
Reporting (SBR) are an attempt to provide detailed information to financial
statement users (Cordery et al., 2011), but to date these formats have appeared
to obfuscate financial reporting information (Dhole et al., 2015). While no
mechanism is currently in place for assuring the tags in financial statements, the
American Institute of Certified Public Accountants has issued guidance on
Audit Data Standards that are voluntary but uniform (AICPA 2015). These
standards relate to standardising data file and field definitions and technical
specifications, along with suggested data validation routines for assessing data
completeness and integrity. The idea is that data should be assured in a less
aggregated form with more frequent assurance. This provides the basis for a
fundamental shift in the nature of financial reporting. If detail-level informa-
tion and high-quality assurance can be easily provided, more frequent reporting
may be just around the corner. That raises the question of whether there is a
demand for more frequent reporting and a willingness to supply that
information. If the profession moves to more frequent reporting, is the current
reporting model sufficient to convey the results for shorter term performance
and financial position? Do we need to explore new reporting models that are
designed to convey the short term financial health of an organisation when
reporting financial information on a continuous basis?
Analysts currently use technologies to aggregate information to produce
forecasting models, but anecdotal information indicates that they are not
using XBRL data because they do not find it particularly complete and there
is no assurance over the accuracy of the tagging. On the other hand, the
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systems are there for analysing XBRL data; and tools are quickly being
developed. The benefit of these tools is largely seen as providing interactivity
with the data and better visualisation capability. Dilla et al. (2010) provides a
very good review on interactivity and visualisation that sheds light on the
issues. This article sets up the research frame for studying how these systems
potentially impact decision-making. Recent research suggests that both
visualisation and interactivity can potentially improve investor confidence,
accuracy and calibration (Tang et al., 2014), but further research is needed to
better understand the potential of these tools to facilitate investor decision-
making.
In an effort to understand how tagging financial statement information might
alter investors’ use of financial information, Arnold et al. (2012a) studied the
search behaviour of professional and non-professional investors. This study
examined the use of tagged, qualitative information from the MD&A of a
medium-sized company’s 10K. This study, which utilised 208 non-professional
investors and 101 professional investors, indicated that analysts’ decision
processes change much less than non-professional investors when using tagged
data. As expected when participants were provided the financial statements in
a.pdf type format with just a table of contents, non-professional investors were
very sequential in their information search process, while professional investors
used a directed search strategy consistent with prior research. When investors
were provided the tagged format, the professional investor’s search strategies
stayed essentially the same. However, non-professional investors became more
directed in their information search, similar to professional analysts, and were
better able to assimilate risk information that was embedded in the qualitative
MD&A information. This research provides preliminary evidence that the
tagging of non-financial information will likely alter the use of information,
particularly for non-professional investors, but the study of this behaviour is in
its infancy. There is still much to learn as XBRL information becomes more
prevalent and more accessible (Srivastava and Kogan, 2010; Alles and Gray,
2012; Alles and Piechocki, 2012; Basoglu and White, 2015).
In addition to formal presentations of financial information, many organ-
isations provide financial information that is freely available on the Internet.
Evidence indicates that many non-professional investors access and use
information from various Internet sources (Hodge and Pronk, 2006), including
social media (Trinkle et al., 2015). Obviously, some websites may provide
higher quality information than others (Cho and Roberts, 2010). Research on
whether investors rely on social media, as well as how investors filter this
information and determine the value in the decision-making process remains
unknown (Triki, 2015). In other words, are investors able to incorporate the
source of the information in order to determine the quality of the information?
Can investors take advantage of technology such as deception detection
software to better assess the quality of the information?
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Technology is also altering the way that publicly traded companies

disseminate information (Debreceny, 2015; Trinkle et al., 2015). Some com-
panies have begun using online videos for press releases (Bons on and
Bedn arova, 2015), and research provides evidence that this affects investor
behaviour. Elliott et al. (2012) examined the announcement of an earnings
restatement via online CEO video on the company website as opposed to
traditional print releases. The results indicate that investor perceptions are
differentially affected when information is released as an online video. Further,
the impact changes based on whether the CEO accepts responsibility for the
restatement or attributes the cause to external sources.
Along these lines, another potential shift in the dissemination of information
is occurring as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (2013) promul-
gated rules that firms can announce financial events through social media, such
as Facebook and Twitter, under the fair disclosure guidelines. That certainly
raises an interesting question. Condensing an information release down to the
short verbiage permitted in a tweet represents a radical change in the
information form (Prokofieva, 2015). Will this affect the way in which investors
incorporate information?
This raises an interesting dilemma. As these various information sources arise
and investors seek quick information releases, they increasingly make their
decisions on unaudited, non-assured information. On the other hand, the audit
firms seemingly desire to limit their assurance to financial information provided
in the annual report. They do not seem to support the idea of continuous
assurance or assurance over tagged data. In a sense, there seems to be a gap
between an investor’s desire for immediate information and the auditor’s desire
to limit the level of assurance on information. The assured information may in
fact be of minimal value to the majority of investors who seek immediate access
to timely information.
This leaves us open to two potential negative effects. One is that if investors
are not using the information that is assured, the audit may become of
increasingly less value in the market place. Second, non-professional investors
have a very limited knowledge regarding what portion of the annual reports are
audited (Bedard et al., 2012). Therefore, the profession’s reputation could be
damaged in the market place as investors rely on information they assume is
audited, when it is not.
Of course, these are empirical questions that provide an opportunity for
behavioural researchers to provide a better understanding of the impact of
technology on financial issues. Many questions need to be addressed in the
rapidly changing financial reporting environment; and these are questions that
may be best answered using ex ante research that is unique to behavioural
methods. By conducting ex ante behavioural research, as researchers, we can
inform policy-makers. But if we wait to run an event study to examine the
impact of new information dissemination methods such as tweets on the
market, we will have missed our chance to lead.
© 2016 AFAANZ
4. Managerial accounting
From an overall perspective, technology may have had a more pervasive,

immediate and dominating effect in the managerial accounting environment
than in auditing or financial accounting. As companies have adopted integrated
information systems, such as enterprise resource planning systems, fundamen-
tal changes to management accounting and management control systems
(MCS) have been implemented (Booth et al., 2000; Seethamraju, 2005).
Generally, research in managerial accounting has done a much better job of
embracing the changes in the environment created by the infusion of
technology.
Nonetheless, management accounting researchers need to recognise that the
basic nature of how management accounting and managerial controls that are
implemented in organisations have fundamentally changed and largely been
automated (Beaubien, 2013). About 5 years ago at the International Symposium
on Accounting Information Systems, Marcus Granlund was the keynote
speaker. He was talking about how much of management accounting processes
were being automated by ERP systems. After he concluded his presentation, I
asked, ‘What does this mean for management accounting research if the
management accountants no longer exist because of automation?’ His answer
was that several of the European management accountants had discussed this
and basically agreed that ‘who or what’ did the work was not that important,
but rather the function of MCS and how it influenced management of the
organisation was what was interesting and what mattered. I do not disagree
with this view but I do think that recognising the technological changes is
fundamental to how behavioural research in management accounting is
conducted and should be considered in research designs.
I was recently reminded of the extent to which management controls are
embedded in technology. While attending an AFAANZ meeting held at the
Crowne Casino, I was heading outside for a walk and had on a baseball cap. I
decided to walk into the casino to one of the restaurants. As I entered into the
casino, the person standing guard at the door asked, ‘Will you please take off
your cap?’ I smiled as I took it off, remembering a casino tour that I was able to
schedule for my Systems Analysis and Controls class a few years ago.
Management took us through the bowels of the casino and demonstrated many
aspects of their MCS. Not surprising, much of their control system is embedded
in the technology that they use. They have cameras in place throughout the
casino and can follow anyone as they move through. They employ facial
recognition software and identify anyone that is on their ‘black list’. That list is
one that is shared by casinos throughout the world. Anyone who enters the
Crowne who is banned from any other casino may be immediately identified
and removed. The gambling chips are embedded with RFID chips. If someone
were to walk out of the casino with a high-dollar-value chip, the casino knows
that chip went out the door; and they know when it comes back. If an employee
© 2016 AFAANZ
were to walk out with a chip, management would immediately know. Chips are
rotated several times a day to make sure that they are all accounted for. Money
is their inventory and the controls over inventory are amazing. These controls
are embedded in the technologies that they use. Casinos were perhaps the first
organisations to effectively begin using Big Data to implement MCS, but other
organisations in other industries are rapidly implementing similar technologies
and the use of surveillance systems to strengthen controls is becoming
increasingly widespread (Warren et al., 2015). But as technology marches
forward, often at the cost of privacy, academics should be leading the discourse
on the ethics of such practices. Should employees’ privacy be so invasively
intruded upon by MCS? What are the effects of such invasive management
control practices on employee morale and retention?
Somewhat related to Big Data is another technology that is having a
profound effect on management accounting – business intelligence (BI) systems
(Elbashir et al., 2011). Out of the box, the software, which is an add-on to an
ERP system, automatically provides over 500 KPIs, a multitude of scorecards
and measures for answering 2900 business performance questions. One could
call it a preprogrammed MCS. Once data are entered into the ERP system, the
BI system can make all of the management accounting and management
control information instantly available and disseminate it throughout the
organisation, whether it is information for an operational manager’s digital
dashboards or CEO’s smartphones. Decision-makers have information
instantly available upon which they are making their decisions. As a group
of CEOs noted on a panel at a continuous audit symposium, every one of them
awoke in the morning to an application on their smartphone that gave them an
instantaneous read of the selected critical KPIs for their organisation.
Stepping back and thinking about how management accounting information
is collected and generated is important. It is entered by an inventory control
manager scanning inventory items, the factory worker scanning a barcode on
an assembly line or the sales clerk scanning goods at the cash register. These
systems collect an abundance of information, both financial and non-financial,
on all aspects of a transaction. Accounting information is no longer manually
entered into a system by an accounting clerk. The assimilation and generation
of this information is not particularly interesting from a research standpoint.
So where are the interesting questions? What organisational factors
determine how successful and how useful these systems are? Is anyone using
the massive amount of information that is being collected by today’s systems?
If they are, are they using it effectively? Management accounting and
management control information can be pushed out to operational- and
executive-level managers very easily. How is this information used by managers
and why does one organisation benefit greatly while another seems to garner
fewer benefits?
Work on BI provides initial insights into these questions as research shows
that organisations with a strong knowledge creation culture are much more
© 2016 AFAANZ
effective at assimilating BI information (Elbashir et al., 2011, 2013, 2016a;

Lee et al., 2014). This research emphasises the importance of top manage-
ment creating a knowledge creation culture that pushes operational-level
managers to adopt a knowledge creation orientation (Lee et al., 2014), but
also to share information across the different business units of the
organisation (Elbashir et al., 2013). This type of organisational culture leads
to much better assimilation of the business intelligence system (Elbashir et al.,
2011).
Follow-up work is currently being conducted to explain why research has
failed to show substantial change in management accounting practice and a
lack of benefits from ERP systems (Elbashir et al., 2016b). This research shows
that benefits accrue from the complementarity of having the ERP system
integrated through the organisation coupled with the BI systems’ analytical and
reporting capability. These findings indicate that if you examine this comple-
mentarity in the light of an organisation’s ability to assimilate BI information
into the operational functions, those operational functions can then be traced
to business process performance gains. Through these associated business
process gains, increases in overall organisational performance accrue. In
essence, these findings show that assimilation of BI information does lead to
performance improvements.
Other recent research has focused on how BI transforms MCS capability. Lee
and Widener (2016) provide evidence as to how BI-driven MCS can be aligned
to improve exploitation and exploration learning – two key elements to
developing organisational ambidexterity. Aligning the capabilities in BI
systems is critical to developing this strategic capability. Similarly, Peters et al.
(2016) looks at how BI quality impacts the diagnostic and interactive
dimensions of MCS which in turn impact performance measurement capabil-
ities. Again, the focus is on supporting and developing strategic capability to
enhance competitive advantage. But, much more work needs to be done at the
organisational level to understand how this information is used in organisa-
tions, whether organisations are tailoring the reporting capability to their
unique business processes, and who is using this information.
Another important aspect that should be considered relates to the
transparency created by these systems. Management accounting and manage-
ment control information is being captured within these integrated information
system and is increasingly available to anyone who has a need to use it. These
systems often create transparency as others using the system have access to
information from other managers, departments and business units. As a result,
this transparency is fundamentally affecting the way individuals make
decisions. If you look at the past management accounting research, there is a
rich literature on budgetary slack and generally on budgeting behaviour of
managers; but, the use of integrated information systems may have altered
those behaviours making the relevance of the research in today’s environment
somewhat questionable.
© 2016 AFAANZ
Recent research has examined how the enterprise systems environment

affects some of this behaviour (Canada, 2013). This research focuses on team
building characteristics of enterprise systems. The findings indicate that mutual
monitoring via transparency generates a team identity among middle
managers. This team identity leads to an increased trust that managers have
in each other and the ability to influence their respective organisations. One of
the inferences that can be made from this is that very little information is truly
private anymore making it questionable as to whether managers can leverage
private information as shown in previous research. The effects identified by
prior research regarding budgetary slack and private information may no
longer exist in organisations on a widespread basis. Of course, this is an
empirical question that should be examined by future research.
Another ramification of findings on the use of BI systems to aggregate and
disseminate information has implication for balanced scorecard research.
Organisations are increasingly using BI to drive KPIs included on digital
dashboards where managers can monitor subordinate’s performance (Reinking
et al., 2015). These dashboards differ by who designs them and why they are
being used. Operational managers who design their own dashboards tend to
focus on KPIs that directly affect their individual performance assessments,
bonuses and compensation schemes. However, in most cases, the digital
dashboards are pushed down from senior management. These dashboards look
very different in terms of the KPIs and are being used to affect strategy
surrogation. In other words, using the old adage of what gets measured gets
done, KPIs that are reported to the operational manager on a digital
dashboard will be strictly aligned with the strategic goals and objectives of the
organisation. In effect, strategy is pushed down to the operational level through
the use of digital dashboards (Reinking et al., 2015).
Basically, information is becoming much more transparent, operational-level
managers are losing many of the tools that were traditionally used in the
budgeting and performance measurement processes, and technology is
increasingly used by senior management to enforce their strategic goals
throughout the organisation. These changes have major implications for how
researchers should approach management accounting, and raise questions as to
how much reliance should be put on large bodies of past research conducted
before these systems were in place when formulating research questions to
investigate contemporary organisations.
Future research that focuses on the higher levels of management is also
needed to understand how senior management uses this wealth of information
and, to a certain degree, whether they are able to effectively use the vast amount
of information that is now available. Tied into this issue is the concept of Big
Data. ‘Big Data and business analytics now permeate almost all aspects of
major companies’ decision making and business strategies’ (Griffin and Wright,
2015, p. 377). Discussions are currently underway in the accounting academic
community about the importance of Big Data to accounting and the rapidly
© 2016 AFAANZ
emerging demand for people skilled in data mining, data analytics and data
modelling to make sense out of all the data that organisations are now
collecting (Griffin and Wright, 2015; Krahel and Titera, 2015; Vasarhelyi et al.,
2015; and Warren et al., 2015).
Consider, for example, the way in which Disney is planning to use big data
for marketing purposes at their theme parks. As part of entry into Disney, a
wrist band is placed on everyone’s arm to monitor all behaviour while in the
park. Information in the wrist band can include your child’s name and
birthdate, so the Disney characters can walk up to your child and greet them by
name. The wrist band can be used to make concession stand purchases (and
will track all of your purchases), and will have GPS tracking so they can locate
your lost child (or know where they go in the park for the entire day).
Obviously, Disney plans to use this information to create a profile about each
person to target advertising, analyse profit and figure out how to target certain
individual’s that can potentially increase profits. While the systems used to
collect big data fit into the traditional idea of management accounting and
management controls, the methods are new, and the data are substantially
greater than those that organisations have collected before.
Let me shift now to a very different part of managerial control which relates
to interorganisational systems and globalisation. Interorganisational relation-
ships are not new. Companies have been partnering with other companies for
decades, but technology has radically changed that by facilitating globalisation
at a completely different level with near instantaneous data transfer. Increas-
ingly, these relationships are transnational and the primary mode of commu-
nication is electronic communication from computer to computer. The
computer systems of these partnering organisations are linked to share
information back and forth and support the joint goals of the partnership or
alliance.
Management control systems researchers have started to recognise this
change and research in this area is quickly evolving. Much of the early MCS
research on interorganisational relationships focused on contracts as a primary
control mechanism. In transnational relationships, contracting is a risky
control because jurisdictional issues can make it much more complex and, in
many cases, render these contracts essentially useless. Also, when you have
situations where a number of small suppliers are participating in the supply
chain with large multinational organisations, the large organisations often
dictate what the small organisations must do. Frequently these small suppliers
are only working with one large organisation. If there is a failure, what recourse
contractually does the large organisation have over these smaller suppliers? The
small supplier probably goes out of business and is unlikely to be able to pay
damages to the larger organisation. The early 2000s saw a shift in the discussion
of interorganisational relationships away from contracting towards trust
and the establishment of trust as a control mechanism (Langfield-Smith
and Greenwood, 1998; Chenhall and Langfield-Smith, 2003; Langfield-Smith
© 2016 AFAANZ
and Smith, 2003; Langfield-Smith, 2008). Chua and Mahama (2007) highlight
how much more expensive these relationships can be when trust cannot be
established.
More recently research on interorganisational relationships has started to
focus on risk and risk management. I certainly view this as one of the most
fertile areas for future research on interorganisational relationships, particu-
larly those relationships that are transnational. Most of the existing research on
risk management has focused on financial risk in the banking and investment
arena. This work has been primarily driven by Michael Power (Power, 2004a,b,
2009; Power et al., 2009) and Annette Mikes (Mikes, 2009, 2011; Kaplan and
Mikes, 2012; Mikes and Kaplan, 2014), and much can be learned from it. Their
research suggests that if organisations try to control risk by instituting too
many measures and controls, they usually end up with a false sense of security
and often failure. Successful risk management seems to come from systems that
aggregate large volumes of data on both internal operations and the external
business environment, and from the organisation’s ability to use this informa-
tion to effectively monitor potential risk and potential opportunities (oddly
named positive risk).
Taken as a whole this area is largely unexplored. The technology aspect is
mostly absent from risk management research even though technology is the
underlying foundation that permits many of these relationships to exist.
Researchers are only beginning to gain an understanding of enterprise risk
management and the benefits that organisations can garner. Recent research
has started to examine the technology aspects trying mostly to understand
where the risks arise, knowing that many of these risks are technology related
(Arnold et al., 2004c, 2010, 2012b, 2014, 2015a,c; Sutton et al., 2008; Sutton
et al., 2009, 2012/13 Hampton et al., 2016).
Sutton et al. (2008) focuses specifically on eliciting knowledge from a wide
variety of experts (IS Security, Internal Audit and External IT Audit) and
shows that the risks typically fall into three different categories: technological
risk, application–user risk and business-level (or strategic) risk. I note this
because when people talk about the technology side of the risk, they often
assume the risk is associated with the technology, when in fact the technology
side of risk is really just the foundation level. Technology risks need to be
controlled to have effective and reliable information flow, but those risks are
not strategic in nature. In these interorganisational relationships, the goal is to
develop partnerships that are strategic in nature and allow the supply chain as a
whole to respond to changes in the competitive landscape. The application–
user risk gets closer to strategic risks in that it deals with the integration of the
external e-commerce systems with internal information systems to effectively
gather and disseminate information in a timely manner. Even more impor-
tantly, the business-level risk deals with whether the alliance partner has the
absorptive capacity (i.e. the knowledge creation capability) to leverage the
information systems for future competitive advantage. Will they be able to
© 2016 AFAANZ
rapidly respond to changes in the competitive nature of the supply chain

relationship? This is a fundamental MCS issue because in today’s environment
rarely is the competition between companies, but rather the competition is
between supply chains. Understanding whether these supply chains are well
controlled and well positioned to react to changes in the business environment
is an important issue. Of course, other issues should be considered in these
relationships and current research is examining how organisations balance
between risk minimisation, partner capability, trust and a willingness to
commit to those relationships. There are many unanswered questions here.
Most of those questions will be difficult to answer without using qualitative
research methods, as well as survey research methods.
Examining these complex relationships means that multimethod research
becomes increasingly important. For many of these issues, field studies
methods are needed to understand the phenomenon at a detailed level before
the broader issues can be examined. In some cases, particularly where
research should be in a leadership position in driving policy, experimental
methods will be critical to provide an ex ante understanding of proposed
changes and emerging phenomena. Many of the issues that I have addressed
particularly in the management accounting area will require more of an
organisational-level study and will be best addressed by some combination of
field studies and surveys. I should be careful to note that when I talk about
surveys, I mean surveys that use well-validated, multimeasure constructs
generally used to build structural models and that are rigorously validated
(Smith and Langfield-Smith, 2004; Hampton, 2015). I note this because I
think that one of the most poorly understood and misused methodologies is
structural equation modelling (SEM). It is imperative that researchers
adopting these methodologies have a solid foundation in psychometrics and
measurement theory. I highly recommend some of the better papers in this
area including Dowling (2009), Elbashir et al. (2011), Mahama and Cheng
(2013) and Hampton (2015). Hampton (2015) is a methods paper that is
specifically focused on what should be included in SEM-based studies and
goes into detail on appropriate strategies for development, validation and
reliability testing.
5. Conclusions
This discussion has explored many facets of how technology is changing the
accounting behavioural research environment. It is critical that accounting
behavioural researchers accept and adopt these changes in developing timely
and appropriate research designs. If accounting researchers are going to have a
relevant voice in the decisions of policy-makers and standards setters, the many
emerging issues surrounding technological change in audit, financial reporting
and management accounting/control must be addressed.
© 2016 AFAANZ
Audit researchers would also be wise to reflect on what has happened in the
management accounting domain.2 As noted, management accounting researchers
have reconciled with the fundamental changes in integrated information systems
that have largely automated the management accounting domain. There simply
are not many management accountants to study anymore. Audit researchers need
to be proactive if they do not want to find themselves in the same situation –
studying an audit function largely devoid of auditors (Sutton et al., 2016).
Discussion at many accounting information systems conferences focuses on
audit automation. As audit automation increases, will the role of the auditor be
to assist collaboratively with these technologies or will automated audits be
technologically dominated? Audit researchers, as well as other accounting
researchers, need to be proactive in considering how the human remains
relevant in a world of automation or the future need for our research may also
be in doubt.
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Accounting and Finance 58 (2018) 315–339

The changing technological environment and the future

In an era where the pace of change continues to escalate, behavioural research

Key words: Plenary speech; Behavioural accounting research; Information

as follows: ‘I use instant messenger (or a form of it that is programmed in the

2. Auditing and assurance

designed to enforce a checklist mentality for adhering to minimum regulatory

outsourced audit work was completed by a similarly credentialed domestic

3. Behavioural financial accounting research

There is a rapidly growing body of research in behavioural ﬁnancial

Technology is also altering the way that publicly traded companies

From an overall perspective, technology may have had a more pervasive,

eﬀective at assimilating BI information (Elbashir et al., 2011, 2013, 2016a;

Recent research has examined how the enterprise systems environment

rapidly respond to changes in the competitive nature of the supply chain

Sutton, S., D. Khazanchi, C. Hampton, and V. Arnold, 2008, Risk analysis in an

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