Assessing the influence factors of audit fatigue and its impact on audit quality

The thesis is intended for investigating the relationship between audit fatigue and audit quality in the pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical industry, being as one of the highly regulated industry face stringent requirements by the regulatory body where the company must comply with minimum requirements for the methods, facilities, and controls used in manufacturing, processing, and packing of a drug product. The regulations will provide assurance mechanism that a product is safe for use, and that it has the ingredients and strength it claims to have. However, limited literature is observed in studying the audit fatigue especially with regards to its contribution factor. Several studies and literatures are reviewed, and it was found that most of the literatures are indicating framework of the integration, benefits and type of integration that can be conceptualized and implemented. This research aims to explore the relationship between audit frequency, internal audit management, system workload/ employees rsquo; experiences and audit fatigue. In addition, impact of the audit fatigue on audit quality/ audit outcome shall be investigated and subsequently a conceptual framework will be proposed as per identified hypotheses. Five out of seven hypotheses were supported in the study. The structural model result shows that there are significant and direct effects in the relationship between audit fatigue, audit frequency, workload, and audit quality. The framework developed in this study was able to contribute to the limited body of knowledge in audit fatigue.