Can auditors be independent? – Experimental evidence on the effects of client type

Recent regulatory initiatives stress that an independent oversight board, rather than the management board, should be the client of the auditor. In an experiment, we test whether the type of client affects auditors’ independence. Unique features of the German institutional setting enable us to realistically vary the type of auditors’ client as our treatment variable: we portray the client either as the management preferring aggressive accounting or the oversight board preferring conservative accounting. We measure auditors’ perceived client retention incentives and accountability pressure in a post-experiment questionnaire to capture potential threats to independence. We find that the type of auditors’ client affects auditors’ behaviour contingent on the degree of the perceived threats to independence. Our findings imply that both client retention incentives and accountability pressure represent distinctive threats to auditors’ independence and that the effectiveness of an oversight board in enhancing auditors’ independence depends on the underlying threat

Through the Ethics Looking Glass: Another View of the World of Auditors and Ethics

Most people are familiar with the traditional view of the role of ethics in the auditing profession – the need for auditors with integrity and objectivity. This essay addresses a second dimension of ethics in the auditing profession – the demand for auditors to assess the integrity and ethical values of clients. This second dimension is a difficult task for auditors in practice and demands a deep and robust understanding of ethics, ethical infrastructures, and the products of those infrastructures. The essay proposes how educators and researchers might facilitate that understanding. Copyright Springer 2007auditing, ethical infrastructure, ethics, integrity,