Outside those jurisdictions where joint audit is regularly practiced, this audit model tends to be poorly understood and frequently remains subject to often repeated but unsubstantiated misapprehensions. Meanwhile, even reviews which set out to provide an objective and comprehensive overview of this mechanism may base their insights and recommendations on a somewhat selective analysis of prior research, partial citations, omissions, and discriminatory interpretation of research results. Meanwhile, academic research into external audit suffers from a multitude of methodological difficulties, and results in mixed, inconclusive, and contradictory results, where even minor changes to assumptions, environmental settings, modelling, and data selection can lead to widely differing conclusions. This also applies to research into joint audit , and perhaps more so. One outcome of this mixed experience is that calls for more empirical research along tried and tested, but debateable, methodologies into joint audit may offer limited promise for more persuasive insights on audit quality effects from any this model. This is not particularly helpful to the current discussion on audit reform, or on debates whether particular audit models and mechanisms might contribute to audit quality. In a reflection on decades of audit reform, Humphrey et al. (2018) suggest that there is a need to ask different questions in the exploration of ways and means to enhance the quality of audit and to allow audit to re-engage with its social role. These authors note a need for stakeholders to adopt a much greater diversity of inquiry, including an exploration of lessons from success as well as failure, and to reflect more deeply on the realities and experiences of audit practitioners. In a closely related discussion, Biehl et al. (2021), exploring issues underlying contradictory empirical results in the audit literature, encourage a focus on audit quality enhancing factors (Biehl et al, 2021).By presenting insights from practitioners, regulators, and audit committee chairs with first-hand experience of joint audit, together with reflections from stakeholders less familiar with its application, the present investigation seeks to expand and build on recent reports, inquiries, consultations and policy reform discussions on the role, future, and shape of external audit. Aiming to inform the discussion on audit reform, this study aims to de-mystify joint audit, sheds a critical light on this audit model, and hopes to provide stakeholders with a deeper understanding of what joint audit is, how it works in practice, and which key characteristics of this model may allow it to make a positive contribution to the quality of external audit
