Managing audit risk and allocating auditing resources are among the major problems faced by external auditors. To address this problem, this paper introduces external auditors to goal programming (GP), an innovative technique that can be used in audit risk models (ARM). The value of an audit report depends on the audit risk: the lower the audit risk, the higher the quality of the audit report. Using GP when calculating audit risk enhances audit quality by helping auditors to manage the multi-choice decision making. However, to date there has been no consideration of GP in ARM. This research provides insights that can be used by audit firms of any size, including those in the Big 4.