For the article below what is the independent, dependent, mediating and moderating variables? What there an experiment conducted? If so, what type of experiment? Was there a variable manipulated? If so, which variable?

Taking care of the auditors Duncan is preparing for the first external audit of his flooring company. Among his 68 employees is a three-person accounting team, and he has always been confident in their abilities. Still, he is somewhat anxious to be sure that everything goes smoothly when the external auditor arrives. At 57, he is hoping to find a buyer for his company so that he can move on to a more relaxed lifestyle. He knows that any buyer would want to be sure that the financial condition of the company is sound and accurately stated, and this is the main reason he has decided to have an external audit. He worries that if the audit team has a bad experience, this might affect his costs as well as the auditors' evaluation. A negative audit opinion, though unlikely, would be disastrous. So he wants to ensure that the auditors will find the company's staff cooperative and they will have no complaints about their treatment. Business owners rely on external audits for a variety of reasons. External auditors provide an independent evaluation of companies' financial statements, ensuring that they fairly represent the operation of the company. External auditors also review companies' operations and controls to establish management compliance with legal and tax regulations. The external auditors' approval of a company's records thus provides credibility and can boost investor confidence in the business (Levitt, 2000). Before the external auditors arrive, companies are advised to prepare for the audit (Harvard University Risk Management and Audit Services website, accessed 2016). The managers should ensure that all the documents that might be requested by the auditors are available. These documents typically include financial statements, inventory reports, quality assurance checklists, and similar records.

Policy and training manuals might also be reviewed, so updated versions of these manuals should be located; out-of-date versions should be removed and shredded. If a company is not well prepared, requested documents may take longer to find, the disruption of normal business activities will be lengthier, and the audit process will be more costly. Advisors suggest that the company's physical premises also need to be prepared: employees should ensure that their work spaces are free of clutter, which makes them look more efficient and organized. Managers are also counselled to arrange Since many readers may be unfamiliar with the activities of an external audit, the author provides descriptive detail so that the reader will understand the significance of the research issue. 2 comfortable meeting rooms for the audit team, with telephone and internet access, and any supplies that may be needed. Another suggestion is to prepare the employees who might be interviewed by the auditors. Key employees should know the timelinesthe start and predicted end of the audit. They should also be instructed to be polite, honest and prompt in response to auditors' questions or requests for documents. Managers should ensure that employees responsible for a particular function are available should the audit team have follow-up questions about that function. BSI Group, a global business consultancy headquartered in Australia, gives the following advice to its clients who are anticipating an external audit: The more organized you are during the audit, the more organized you and the company will appear to the auditor. The old saying "don't judge a book by its cover" is hard to apply in the auditing world where initial impressions of the premises, the quality manager's preparation and the documentation are often difficult to overlook (BSI website, accessed 2016). Thus Duncan, the business owner in our opening case, may be correct in his view that being pleasant to the audit team will lead them to have a more favourable assessment of his company. In this research study, we will examine specific actions that a business owner may take in preparation for an external audit. We propose that a company's preparation with regard to available documentation, employee readiness and the physical premises all make an agreeable environment for the audit team, and this agreeable environment will enhance the auditors' view that the client is helpful, and their trust of the client. The auditor's task. At the start of an audit, auditors make decisions about what type of audit tests and how much testing to do (Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants, 2008). One of the important decisions they make is how deeply and rigorously they will look for evidence of a problem (Solomon & Shields, 1995).

If they decide to dig deeply into the company's records, then they are more likely to find a problemif a problem indeed exists. Thus the audit procedures may require a more or less rigorous examination of data before the audit team is satisfied (Arens, Elder, Beasley, & Splettstoesser, 2005). We propose that if the auditors do not trust that the company is well organized and helpful (because the client is ill-prepared), this might act as a signal that the auditors need to do more extensive and rigorous audit testing. If, on the other hand, the audit team likes and trusts the managers, audit testing will be less rigorous. Here is the statement of the broad research goals. 3 Hypothesis 1: Client preparation of an agreeable environment increases auditors' perception that the client is helpful. Hypothesis 2: The auditor's perception that the client is helpful increases auditors' trust of the client. Hypothesis 3: Perceived helpfulness and trust of the client are negatively related to the rigour of audit testing. Method Participants: The participants were students in a university-level auditing course. The researcher invited 183 auditing students to participate, offering them a bonus mark for taking part in the study. One hundred and twenty of them participated (66% response rate). Sixty-three percent of the participants were female, and the ages of the sample ranged from 20 to 39 with an average of 24.6 years. All but four of the students had full-time or part-time work experience (average full-time = 2.4 years of experience and average part-time = 3.9 years of experience). Procedures: Participants were shown a short video of a client meeting and asked to play the role of the auditor of the company. The (fictitious) company in the video was in the light bulb industry and was planning a new manufacturing expansion to China. In essence, the video portrayed a conversation among the chief executive officer, chief financial officer, and chief operations officer of the company. After seeing the video, participants were presented with the company's financial documentation and asked to evaluate the client. They then completed a questionnaire about their liking for and trust of the company's managers. Measures: The independent variable was the presence or absence of an agreeable environment (Wallace, 2012).

This was manipulated in the video by the insertion of specific comments made in the meeting. The presence of an agreeable environment was represented by four specific preparation activities. These included that in the past, the company's management had: a) responded quickly to an auditor's requests for documents; b) volunteered information useful to the auditor; c) taken the time to teach subordinates; and d) provided auditors with a large, comfortable room to work in. Taking these three hypotheses together, we see that the existence of an agreeable environment (yes or no) is the major independent variable, perception of client helpfulness and trust are mediating variables, and the rigour of audit testing is the dependent variable. The researcher used a hypothetical scenario as a measure of the independent variable. This allowed her to manipulate the variablehalf the participants saw a video in which comments were inserted which showed that the managers had been helpful to the auditors. The other half of the participants saw a video in which the inserted comments described unhelpful managers. Control of extraneous variables was ensured since everything else in the videos was identical. Random assignment was used to determine which participants would see which video. These three features of the procedures make it a typical laboratory experiment. 4 To portray the absence of an agreeable environment there were different specific comments inserted into the conversation. It was stated that in the past, the company's management had: a) responded slowly to an auditor's requests for documents; b) threatened to replace auditors when they disagreed with the client firm; c) blamed subordinates for the manager's own mistakes; d) provided auditors with a small, uncomfortable room to work in. Apart from these specific comments, the content of the videos was identicali .

The videos were randomly assigned to the participants. Perceived helpfulness of the client was measured using an established five-item scale (Mayer & Davis, 1999) anchored at 1 = disagree strongly and 5 = agree strongly. Some examples of the items in this scale are "Client management will go out of its way to help me" and "Client management really looks out for what is important to me." The internal consistency in this sample was good ( = .84). Trust of the client was measured using an established 10-item scale (Gillespie, 2003) anchored at 1 = not at all willing and 7 = completely willing. Some sample questions are "How willing are you to rely on the client manager's task related skills and abilities?" and "How willing are you to depend on the client manager to handle an important issue on your behalf?" The internal consistency of this measure is also good ( = .83). Rigour of audit testing. Auditors have an arsenal of analytic techniques they use to review the financial story the company is telling them about itself. If the basic tests show inconsistencies, the auditors must ask more questions and demand a larger amount of supporting evidence. These decisions are a routine part of an audit (Solomon & Shields, 1995) and have been used as a measure of the extent of audit testing in prior research (Heintz & White, 1989). In this study, the student auditors were asked to estimate the amount of testing they would do on the basis of the financial information presented, and this was our measure of the dependent variable.