Characteristics Of The Audit Quality Of An Auditor

Introduction

In the ever changing business world and environment, there is a need for stability and reassurance about the credibility of any organisations financial reporting. The role of an auditor is to be an independent party that assesses the accuracy and credibility of an organisations financial information in order to provide assurance to end users (Antle, 1984). There has been a notion that the quality of an auditor’s opinion lies solely on the auditor’s professional judgement by the public, however the audit profession has argued that audit quality is not just reliant on the judgement of an auditor, but rather from the inputs from many stakeholders involved with an organisation. In this essay we will discuss what audit quality is, the audit quality model and finally determine which view is relatively more correct in today’s business environment.

This caused a major investigation on regulations by the United States to ensure this kind of event will never happen again. This shows that although audit as a profession has existed for a long period of time, it is not yet perfect at preventing such events from occurring which shows that it needs to be continually improving in order to succeed. Agency theory is also integral to the audit profession as in many cases, auditing is conducted to ensure the agent (organisation) is acting in the principals (stakeholders) best interests instead of prioritising their self-interest which in most cases would be profits at the expense of shareholders (Eisenhardt,