‘Are we good? or do we need to keep going?’: unraveling auditors’ comfort with evidence sufficiency determinations

Determining when sufficient appropriate evidence has been gathered is a critical aspect of audit judgment, with regulators citing insufficient evidence as a key deficiency in audits. Drawing on interviews with 45 auditors across firms of varying sizes and using a theoretical framework that integrates the structured and affective dimensions of professional judgment, our study explores how auditors approach evidence sufficiency determinations. While auditors begin with established guidelines such as predefined document lists or materiality thresholds, these often prove insufficient or ill-suited to specific scenarios, triggering discomfort. This discomfort may prompt auditors to seek relief by adjusting evidence expectations through revised thresholds, incremental evidence gathering, and the construction of mental models. Auditors may also incorporate experiential factors, renewing their sense of what counts as ‘enough,’ or draw on relational cues such as client interactions and inputs from reviewers and team members to support comfort renewal and/or achieve relief. Comfort reflects a provisional and dynamic state emerging through a recursive feedback loop between structured procedures, interpersonal interactions, and auditors’ affective sense of when evidence sufficiency has been achieved. These findings offer a more nuanced understanding of how evidence sufficiency judgments unfold in practice, with implications for audit research and standard setting.