Investigating and Evaluating Performance Motivation Bias in Auditors under Time Budget Pressure (Case Study: Auditors of the Court of Iran's Audit)

 The audit quality of the Auditors of the Supreme Audit Court is of particular importance and its enhancement will improve the performance of the government. Recourse to non-professional affairs is one of the most common ways to deal with time budget pressure in auditing. These behaviors and trends that are the result of time budget pressure directly or indirectly affect the quality of audit work. Auditors use different methods to improve their performance under time budget pressure. The present study describes a bias in performance motivation that auditors use to improve their performance.

This research is a survey type and the research tool is a questionnaire. The tested sample includes 380 auditors of the Court of Audit who with different experiences evaluated the effectiveness of the client's internal control system as one of the auditing steps under high and low time budget pressure.

The results showed that increasing the time pressure on auditors for using the motivation assessment leads to an increase in performance, and an auditor's experience also has a direct relation with this trend. The results show that less experienced auditors, under high time budget pressure, have reported negative  information about controls as less relevant.

The results highlight the importance of employing experienced auditors under high time budget pressures to reduce the effects of using performance motivation assessments.