Noise in an audit does not come from clicking computers, ruffling papers or the chat amongst auditors. It has no connection to road works in the street during the audit or loud music in the audit room. According to accounting research, noise comes from audit judgements. It is not as though auditors shout or blow trumpets when making noisy judgements. This noise is figurative and totally silent. I found it by chance in a research abstract entitled Noise in Audit Judgments [1] by Bart Dierynck and Lobke Weijers in Holland where they define noise as ‘the unwanted variability in professional judgment’ of auditors as they make decisions.
To measure noise, they naturally don’t use a sound level meter for acoustic measurement. They employ a ‘noise audit’ which, from reading the paper, is simply the study of answers made by auditors to a questionnaire. Their noise does have different levels but they do not measure it in decibels. They do, however, have three different categories of noise.
Researchers invert ‘noise level’ and call the first category, ‘level noise’, which I understand is the level of scepticism or more precisely variances in the level of scepticism of auditors.
The second is called ‘stable pattern noise’. But it is not stable and has no pattern either, because according to the example in the research abstract to illustrate stable pattern noise, one needs to understand the behaviour of ‘dark triad auditors’. Due to their high levels of psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism (not one but all three together), dark triad auditors don’t lose their scepticism as fast as ordinary auditors during social interaction with the client. Apparently auditors become deaf to scepticism over time, dark triads never need these hearing aids for scepticism.
The third category is ‘occasion noise’ no doubt similar to cheeping of birds in the garden. Occasion noise is the variability in judgment of an auditor at different points in time. For example an auditor in a bad mood in the morning does not make the same audit decision as in a good mood in the afternoon.
To make their lives more complex the researchers examined how mindfulness and burnout lead to differences in noise. In the interviews with the 163 auditors, they must have asked for volunteers to be included in the burnout group to be able to compare them with the mindful group. They did not explain how they found auditors in burnout. That would have been interesting. Auditors in true burnout would not have been able to answer any questionnaire.
There is, however, one ‘notable finding’ which contravenes prior research. Total noise ie unwanted variability of decision making, is made up of the three noises more or less equally. This means that variances in the level of scepticism (level noise), social interaction and professional experience (stable pattern noise) and the mood of the auditor (occasional noise) contribute equally to unwanted variability of decision making.
This, in turn means, for coherent decision making auditors must work on constant scepticism, have little or no social interaction with clients, obtain adequate professional experience and remain in a good mood throughout the audit. In other words, they should no longer go out for a beer with the finance department and must never come in to work if in a bad mood.
[1] Noise in Audit Judgments by Bart Dierynck and Lobke Weijers, Tilburg School of Economics and Management, Tilburg University, January 2025. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5116490