Investigating the Halo Effect on the Professional Auditor's Career

A bias or perceptual error is a kind of deviation from the facts in decision making or judgment that affects individual actions negatively. This is also no exception to the audit profession, and the auditor is fascinated by an attribute of the performance of the company or the owner who is subject to this bias and causes his judgment to deviate from reality. The purpose of this research is investigating the halo effect on the professional auditor's career. The subjects' questioning period was 6 months from December, 2018 to June, 2019. The statistical population of the study was the auditors working under the supervision of the audit organization, which participated in two groups of testing and control. The research instrument was a questionnaire to measure the halo effect O' Donnel & Schultz (2005) questionnaire and professional career evaluation questionnaires were inspired by Draz (2010). This research used to analyze the hypothesis of the research, multivariate Multivariable Analyze of Variance (Manova), repeated variance analysis and follow-up tests were used to compare the time. The results of the research, in the form of the first hypothesis, showed that auditors who have the Lack of bias halo, have a higher professional identity than other auditors. Also, based on the results of the second hypothesis, auditors who have Lack of bias halo, have higher professional skepticism than other auditors.