How Do Client-Provided Benchmarking Data Impact Auditors’ Evaluations of Level 3 Fair Value Discount Rate Assumptions?

This article summarizes the published study “The Impact of Benchmark Set Composition on Auditors’ Level 3 Fair Value Judgments” (Bhattacharjee, Moreno and Wright 2019), which examines how auditors’ judgments of the reasonableness of a client’s discount rate for a Level 3 investment are impacted by client-provided benchmarks. In two experiments, the authors find that audit seniors’ and managers’ judgments of a client-preferred discount rate for an investment are inappropriately influenced by the set of peer companies provided by the client as justification. Managers are less susceptible than seniors, likely due to highly developed knowledge structures. Results suggest that providing structured audit guidance to the seniors for conducting analyses somewhat reduces but does not eliminate this effect. The study’s findings have implications for other auditing contexts using benchmarking such as goodwill impairment, inventory obsolescence, and valuation estimates and for audit firms when auditing complex estimates and determining staffing of audit engagements.