SUMMARY The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's (PCAOB) Auditing Standard No. 5 (AS5) encourages external auditors to rely on internal auditors to increase the efficiency of lower-risk internal control evaluations (PCAOB 2007). We use post-SOX experimental data to compare the levels and effects of employer (client) identification on the control evaluations of internal (external) auditors. First, we find that internal auditors perceive a greater level of identification with the evaluated firm than do external auditors. We also find some evidence that, ceteris paribus, internal auditors are less lenient than external auditors when evaluating internal control deficiencies (i.e., tend to support management's preferred position to a lesser extent). Further, while we support Bamber and Iyer's (2007) results by finding that higher levels of external auditor client identification are associated with more lenient control evaluations, we demonstrate an opposite effect for internal auditors—higher levels of internal auditor employer identification are associated with less lenient control evaluations. Our results are important because we are the first to capture the relative levels of identification between internal and external auditors, as well as the first to compare directly internal and external auditor leniency, both of which are important in light of AS5. That is, we provide initial evidence that external auditors' increased reliance on internal auditors' work, while increasing audit efficiency, also could improve audit quality by resulting in less lenient internal control evaluations, due, at least in part, to the effects of employer and client identification. Data Availability: Contact the first author.

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Individuals’ technology use decisions are critical to the success of information technology in an organizational context. We investigate the influence of process accountability on individual professionals’ intended and actual use of a familiar technology in decision-making tasks directly related to their work role by anchoring in the core constructs of the technology acceptance model (TAM). Our focus differs from traditional initial user acceptance research in that participants have considerable knowledge about and experience with the focal technology. According to results from an experiment involving 130 participants, process accountability has a significant, positive effect on perceived technology usefulness, intention to use, and actual technology use. Further analyses show that perceived technology usefulness mediates the accountability-intention relationship and intention to use mediates the accountability-actual use relationship. By incorporating process accountability into the TAM and empirically testing its effects, we shed light on the causal link between process accountability and people’s perceptions of a familiar technology’s usefulness, as well as their intentions and actual use of the technology. Our findings show that process accountability, a source of extrinsic motivation commonly found in business work contexts, has important effects on people’s decisions to use a familiar technology in work-related decision-making tasks. We extend user technology acceptance research by connecting motivation theories, cognitive information processing, and user technology acceptance, particularly in scenarios that involve voluntary use of familiar technology, and the requirement to justify the procedure used for deriving a decision or completing a problem-solving task. Our findings have several important implications for technology acceptance decisions and management practice.