Discussant's response to "Self-evaluative privilege";

              Discussant's Response To "Self-Evaluative Privilege"
Theodore J. Mock*
University of Southern California
Introduction and Significance of Issue
As a somewhat frequent participant in the Kansas Symposium on Audit Problems, I today find myself in somewhat of an unusual situation—that of dis-cussant rather than presenter or observer. But in any role, I always welcome the opportunity to participate in the grandfather symposium of systematic, academ-ic-based audit research. I congratulate Raj Srivastava, his colleagues, and Deloitte & Touche for once again organizing an interesting set of research and position papers.
As a discussant for an issues paper based in practice, I feel obligated to give a qualification similar to what one often hears from practitioners as they discuss academic papers. Before I began to prepare my comments, I really knew very little about self-evaluative privilege or the other issues raised in Tom Powell's paper.
However, the fact that I was generally unfamiliar with the issues raised, at least from a research perspective, implies that we may have a research area which is academically novel. In addition, the fact that a prominent practitioner is raising the issue implies that the issues are practically relevant. What else could a researcher ask for? Perhaps, not much more. However, an academic dis-cussant is bound to feel a bit uncomfortable reacting to a paper that includes lit-tle literature, theory, methodology or statistical analysis!
So, what to do? Tom Powell's paper is a lucid statement of a set of issues dealing with access to audit work-products which he develops from an internal auditor's perspective. This is clearly an issue to both internal and external audi-tors and Tom is to be commended for bringing it to the attention of the academ-ic community.
In my comments, I attempt to achieve two primary objectives. First, I attempt to react positively to Tom's challenge in his closing paragraph of identi-fying some promising research opportunities in the arena. Second, I provide some guidance as to what kinds of additions to practitioner's papers (e.g. inte-gration of academic literature and development of more detailed models or the-ories) would help promote audit research. Such additions to papers of this nature would help to bridge the Practitioner-Academic Research Gap.
Specifically, the following three topics are discussed. First, is the topic of what aspects of auditor workpaper access are researchable from a scientific
* Helpful suggestions from Ganesh Krishnamoorthy are gratefully acknowledged.
106