Solving the External Auditor Assignment Problem via GMRACCF

The audit process is a critical component of any company's financial management. It aims to guarantee that the financial statements of a company are accurate, reliable, and in compliance with relevant laws and regulations. Additionally, auditing provides an opportunity for companies to pinpoint areas for improvement, which can help increase efficiency and reduce instances of financial fraud and corruption. As lots of companies with small scales choose to perform the audits externally rather than relying on an internal team, the evaluation of the performance has become a significant problem during building an auditor team. Meanwhile, efficiency is another factor to pursue. This paper formalizes this problem with the Group Multirole Assignment with the Cooperation and Conflict Factors (GMRACCF) model. Specifically, we propose a new method to evaluate the efficiency factors and build a cooperation and conflict factors (CCF) matrix by turning it into time CCFs between auditors. Therefore, with several experiments being conducted, we can know that time factors can have different impacts on the performance of the External Auditor Assignment Problem (EAAP) depending on how much emphasis has been placed on its influence.