Auditor's Bias and how to handle it

While being auditors, each of us have our own area of interest in which we are passionate to a fault. This edge or rather compulsion by our past success or pleasant experience tends to involuntarily drag our minds towards that area all of us being creatures of habit. Thus being a good auditor with super specialisation actually makes you focus on that area with a microscope at the cost of a balanced audit of all the areas involved. For example, you could have success in discovering wrong TDS made in the past audits which have been praised by your professional circle. In a new audit your mind will automatically zone in on the TDS made irrespective of the internal controls and systems that exists in the organisation. This is where the conflict between specialisation or rather obsession over an area and audit assurance with professional scepticism begins.
This bias is significant since in many occasions it tends to displace our attention to trivial things instead of dispassionate professional analysis driven by materiality.
A simple cure to this obsession is following the time tested mechanism of a detailed day wise audit plan coupled with technology driven stratified sampling of the transaction which are made very easy with the advent of Computer Aided Audit Techniques like ACL (Audit Command Language) or IDEA(Interactive Data Extraction & Analysis). The duo if followed will more or less ensure that all the possible areas are audited and that the auditor does not linger near his favourite area for more than the required time.