Auditor's Inertial Behavior against Client Influence: An Analysis Based on the Comprehensiveness of Individual Characteristics

Independence in auditing is one of the most basic characteristics that an auditor should have in order to adhere to the requirements and standards related to maintaining ethics and performance to improve the quality of auditing, to have inertial capabilities to resist the influence of owners. Inertial behavior triggers independence in the auditor, which leads to an increase in endurance capacity and intolerance of the client. The Purpose of this research is Auditor's Inertial Behavior against Client Influence by An Analysis Based on the Comprehensiveness of Individual Characteristics. The methodology of this research was mixed and used in the qualitative part of the grounded theory analysis based on Glaser's approach to formulate the model and in the quantitative part of the fuzzy structural interpretive analysis. Because in the qualitative part, a theoretical framework was first presented and in the quantitative part, the research sought to determine the most effective component of the auditor's inertial behavior against the influence of the client. The target population in the quality department was 12 academic specialists who were considered experts, both scientifically and empirically. The selection process was a theoretical sampling method based on the snowball technique. But the target population in a small number of 19 auditors with work experience and level of technical and specialized knowledge were selected through homogeneous sampling. This number of participants was approved because of the nature of the fuzzy interpretive matrix analysis, which emphasizes the limited number of participants in the research. The results of the research in the qualitative part indicate the existence of 3 categories, 8 components and 35 concept codes that have laid the dimensions of the auditor's inertial behavior against the client's influence in the form of an integrated 8-dimensional model. The results also indicate in a small part of the prioritization of the components of the auditor's inertial behavior in three levels of the matrix model that the third level was the most effective component and the first level was the least effective component related to each of the research categories. Therefore, it was found that focusing on the internal control center is the most effective behavioral measure in the auditor's inertia against the client's influence.