Audit quality plays an essential role in maintaining an efficient market environment. External audits performed in accordance with high quality auditing standards provide a fundamental contribution in the implementation of accounting standards by reporting entities. This paper analyze the critical view of previous literature on audit quality and deeply examines the standard setters proposal on audit quality in order to verify if they created a coherent approach that could be used in the generation of a unique Audit quality framework. A specific focus is on the PCAOB and IAASB projects on audit quality that try to identify the purpose, characteristics, and indicators of the audit quality, setting off two different perspectives in the audit quality debate. At the end of the review and of the analysis, we deem that regulators and academic researches should consider also the pivotal role of the stakeholders to link the audit quality not only to input, process or output issues, but also to those audit quality drivers outside the direct control of audit firms
