Audit hours

Evidence from China Audit hours are the most visible indicator of how much effort an auditor has made on a certain audit project (Davidson and Gist, 1996; Niemi, 2005; Caramanis and Lennex, 2008; Kwon et al

, 2013)

On a typical day, the projects he works on might include process improvements, internal control identification and testing, reviews of policies and procedures, audit planning, external audit assistance, reviewing work papers, inventory counts, IT audits, and, on rare occasions, fraud investigations

IT specialists accounted for 10

7% of US public company audit hours

Tax, valuation and other specialists’ time represented 4

7%, 1 4% and 1

0% of total US public company audit hours, respectively

accounted for 20% of US audit hours, compared with 18% the previous year