Reforming Auditor Independence: Voicing and Acting upon Auditors’ Concerns and Criticisms

This paper takes position against the spread of the free-market logic in the domain of accountancy, where free market is often viewed as undeniably benefiting society and users of financial statements. A key moment that paved the way for the growing influence of the free-market logic in accountancy resides in the elimination of institutional ethics rules prohibiting direct and uninvited solicitation of clients, which occurred in the 1970s. Importantly, it was (some would say quite naïvely) assumed that auditors would be able to maintain their independence from auditees in a surrounding climate emphasizing market competition and individualism. However, research indicates that before the collapse of Enron and Arthur Andersen, a number of auditors were significantly concerned about auditor independence being undermined in actual practice. Yet, their concerns were kept largely in the dark. It took the billion-equity collapse of Enron and the powerful imagery related to the shredding of documents by its external auditor Arthur Andersen, as well as the collapse of WorldCom a few months afterwards, to bring to light the undermining of auditor independence in the public arena and to create a momentum in favour of reforming authoritative regimes of auditor independence, therefore constraining to some extent the influence of the free-market logic in accountancy. My main argument is that these collapses could perhaps have been avoided if auditors’ dissenting and negative points of view on auditor independence had been voiced, heard, and appropriately taken into account by accounting organizations and regulatory bodies. Accordingly, it is recommended that channels be established for practising auditors to communicate concerns that emerge from their daily experiences and which cast doubt on the conceptual foundations of financial auditing. Establishing such mechanisms may help to guard against the excesses of the free-market logic; the latter definitely should not reign unchallenged.