We investigate how the design of audit processes influences employees’ reporting decisions. We focus specifically on detective employee audits for which several employees are randomly selected after a defined period to audit their ex-post behavior. We investigate two design features of the audit process, namely, employee anonymity and process transparency, and analyze their impact on misreporting. Overall, we find that both components influence the extent of individuals’ misreporting. A nonanonymous audit decreases performance misreporting more than an audit in which the employee remains anonymous. Furthermore, the high incidence of performance misreporting in the case of anonymous audits can be decreased when the process transparency is low. Thus, our study informs accountants about how the two design features of employee anonymity and transparency of the audit process can be used to constrain performance misreporting to increase the efficiency of audits.

我们调查审计流程的设计如何影响员工的报告决策。我们特别关注侦探员工审计，在规定的时间段内随机选择几名员工来审计他们的事后行为。我们调查了审计流程的两个设计特征，即员工匿名性和流程透明度，并分析了它们对误报的影响。总的来说，我们发现这两个组成部分都会影响个人误报的程度。与员工保持匿名的审计相比，非匿名审计更能减少绩效误报。此外，当流程透明度较低时，可以降低匿名审计中绩效误报的高发率。因此，