Analytical Procedures, Risk Signals, and Auditor’s Professional Judgment in Audit Planning: An International Literature Review
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Analytical procedures are widely used during audit planning to identify unexpected relationships, unusual fluctuations, and other risk-relevant information, yet the literature explaining how such information is evaluated and incorporated into auditors’ planning-stage professional judgment remains fragmented across research on analytical procedures and research on auditor judgment and decision making. This narrative review examines how risk signals arising from analytical procedures are evaluated, weighted, and integrated by auditors when assessing risks of material misstatement during audit planning. Using purposive and snowball sampling, the review synthesizes literature spanning the 1970s to 2026. The synthesis organizes existing research through a review-specific conceptual framework in which risk-relevant analytical results are evaluated as signals, weighted and integrated with other information, examined through diagnostic reasoning, and incorporated into evolving risk assessments through belief updating; professional skepticism operates as a cross-cutting condition affecting the quality of these processes. The review identifies three related gaps: limited theoretical integration across these cognitive mechanisms, insufficient empirical examination of the integrated process and its boundary conditions, and uncertainty regarding the transferability of existing findings across different institutional and technological audit environments. Its principal conceptual contribution is therefore not the introduction of a new standalone theory, but the organization and connection of previously separate research streams into a common planning-stage explanatory account
Institution: National University of Mongolia
Language: English
Subfield: Accounting
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7220360615