Escaping ‘Groundhog Day’: the transformative possibilities of reconceptualising audit

Christopher Humphrey, Brendan O’Dwyer and Martin Martinoff

Accounting and Business Research, 2025, vol. 55, issue 6, 668-692

Abstract: The statutory company audit can be a puzzling phenomenon. While heralded as a public interested function, its resulting audit reports are only addressed to the members of the audited company. Audit may be widely acknowledged as a social construction, but it has remained conceptually static, with a recycling of reform proposals and a resulting, persistent audit expectations gap. Recent responses to this state of affairs, however, have included calls for a ‘dynamic repair’ of audit and an official proposal by the Brydon review for the UK government to give legislative backing to a significantly expanded purpose for audit. This paper further advances such proposals by illuminating the transformative possibilities of conceptualising audit as an innovation ecosystem in its own right and classifying auditors as ecosystem engineers. Collectively, such a conceptual reconfiguration can serve to enhance both the social purposefulness of audit and its public interested sense of professionalism by freeing audit from the constraints of excessive standardisation and promoting its inherent, functional diversity.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/00014788.2024.2375713

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