Abstract
External auditing is promoted as a trust-engendering technology. Recurring audit failures, however, undermine confidence in corporate governance. The traditional response to the crisis is to manage it by tweaking the regulatory structures: revising accounting or auditing standards, ethical guidelines and arrangements for disciplining accountants and accountancy firms. Such responses do not appear to check the incidences of real or alleged audit failures. Since audit failures are the product of the values governing accountancy firms, this paper encourages a focus upon such values, providing some evidence of their nature. The paper concludes that accountancy firms are firmly focused upon the need to make a profit, possibly at the expense of wider social obligations.
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Sikka, P. Some questions about the governance of auditing firms. Int J Discl Gov 1, 186–200 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jdg.2040023
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.jdg.2040023