The incapability of Ernst & Young ShinNihon LLC as independent auditor of PT. Thosiba in revealing markup as much as US$ 1.22 billion since 2008 added to the news on auditor failure in implementing professional skepticism. The failure of implementing professional skepticism is considered one of the reasons of deficiency and audit failure that later will impact on worsening of audit reputation and credibility crisis.
Drs. Rusmawan W. Anggoro, MSA saw this as one of deficiency problems that are faced by auditor profession in Indonesia. “Auditor in Indonesia faces audit deficiency audit that comes up because of the lack of skepticism professional that is implemented and of the increasing finance report complexity and problems related to limitation of an accountant to face AEC competition,” he said on his defense during his open doctoral exam, Monday (12/14), at Faculty of Economics and Business UGM.
In his dissertation titled The Influence of Educational Background, Time Pressure and Consequences to Auditor Professional Skepticism, Rusmawan analyzed three main issues which are the opportunity of auditor candidate from any major formal education , deficiency and audit failure because of inaccurate implementation of professional skepticism and the need of mechanism to mitigate deficiency and the failure of an audit by increasing auditor professional skepticism, and explore the role of professional skepticism in improving audit quality through skeptical behavior.
He confirmed previous results of researches, one of those related to the negative infuence of time pressure on audit quality, and the effectivity of punishment through review mechanism on particular level to mitigate inappropriate behavior of auditors. Besides, auditors with accounting background tend to have higher professional state than others.
“Knowledge from formal education with knowledge from on-the-job training is not always interchangeable,” he explained. Therefore, studying at Accounting Profession Education (PPAk) for accountant candidate with non-accountant background will save cost and time for creating good auditors.