Defining auditor's responsibilities

              The Accounting Historians Journal
Vol. 24, No. 2
December 1997
Joni J. Young
UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO
DEFINING AUDITORS' RESPONSIBILITIES
Abstract: This paper explores the efforts of the audit
profession to dominate definitions of their roles and
responsibilities throughout the last two decades. The
paper considers alternative definitions of these roles and
responsibilities as forwarded by others and the
justifications and defenses provided by auditors to
legitimize their conceptions of these matters.
The U.S. auditing profession maintains that its work enhances the
reliability and credibility of financial statements and thereby facilitates
the operation of capital markets. Although the profession has
benefitted greatly from legislated requirements for annual audits, it
has also fought forcefully to dominate the definitions of its tasks,
roles, and responsibilities—to perform audits as it sees fit. In
developing and maintaining a particular position relative to their
responsibilities in conducting financial audits, auditors have attempted
to tell the public whom they serve as well as the types of tasks that
the public may reasonably expect the profession to undertake.
This insistence upon a self-definition of tasks, roles and
responsibilities should not be surprising. With the passage of the
securities acts and licensing statutes by individual states, auditors
have demarcated the attestation of financial statements as an element
of their professional jurisdiction. Through such demarcations,
professions attempt to gain legitimate control over particular kinds of
work [Abbott, 1988]. They claim the right to perform work within
their jurisdiction as they deem appropriate and also to dominate
public definitions of their professional tasks. In effect, professions
are asking the public to trust that they know best how to define their
professional roles and responsibilities and how to accomplish their
professional tasks. Carmen Blough [1939, p. 165] succinctly captured
this position in discussing why auditors should refer to audit
Submitted November 1996
Revised April 1997
Accepted September 1997