Risk and the construction of a European audit policy agenda: The case of auditor liability

Anna Samsonova-Taddei and Christopher Humphrey

Accounting, Organizations and Society, 2015, vol. 41, issue C, 55-72

Abstract: In 2008, following a sustained policy campaign by the large international accounting firms, the European Commission issued a Recommendation that European Union (EU) Member States should limit civil liability for statutory auditors. The Recommendation, however, was far from the firms’ desired outcome because, as a non-binding policy document, it left it to individual Member States to decide whether (or not) and how to limit auditors’ liability exposure. This paper analyzes the European transnational audit policy-making processes by which such a decision was reached and what prevented the firms from securing a more definitive EU-wide policy solution with respect to auditor liability limitation. Drawing on Hilgartner’s concept of a ‘risk object’, the paper reveals how a search for a policy consensus on auditor liability was invariably frustrated by the competing conceptualizations of, and exposure to, risk attributed to particular proposed liability arrangements. As such, auditor liability emerges as a constantly shifting regulatory construct rather than a dilemma waiting to be resolved. The study also emphasizes the residing significance of the authority of the nation state in the European audit policy context, with policy preferences of individual EU Member States having a substantial influence on the outputs of European audit policy making.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361368214000725
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:aosoci:v:41:y:2015:i:c:p:55-72

DOI: 10.1016/j.aos.2014.08.002

Access Statistics for this article

Accounting, Organizations and Society is currently edited by Christopher Chapman

More articles in Accounting, Organizations and Society from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().