变化中的会计师审计独立性——与当前环境与时俱进 外文原文

The Varying Concept of Auditor Independence Shifting with the Prevailing Environment，C. Richard BakerAUGUST 2005 - As CP A Journal Editor-in-Chief Robert Colson observed in his March 2004 column, “Auditor Independence Redux,” the concept of auditor independence has varied over the last 150 years. In a general sense, auditor independence has borne a relationship to the prevailing commercial environment in different time periods. There has not, however, been a clear transition from one concept of auditor independence to another. Frequently, more than one idea of auditor independence has been present in the discussion about independence between professional accountants and auditors, regulators, and the general public.The initial concept of auditor independence, which arose during the 19th century, was based on the premise, primarily British in origin, that a principal duty of professional accountants and auditors was the oversight of absente investments in the existing and former colonies of the British Empire. During this period, a relatively small number of accounting firms could perform audits for a relatively large number of entities. Professional accountants and auditors could render reports on the financial performance of different entities and could work for different investor groups.The concept of auditor independence during this era did not conceive of auditors as advocates for audited entities; British investors explicitly forbade auditors from investing or working in the businesses that they audited. At the same time, as long as auditors maintained their primary loyalty to the investors back home, the scope of professional accounting services could be reasonably broad. For example, auditors were permitted to keep the books and prepare the financial statements for the entities they audited.This initial concept of auditor independence changed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, there was an economic shift from capital coming primarily from foreign sources to capital deriving primarily from domestic sources. This change was associated with the emergence of large Americancorporations in industries such as mining, railroads, energy, and telegraph and telephone. The emergence of large American corporations was accompanied by a change in the understanding of the purpose and nature of the business corporation. In the 1930s, noted economists Adolf Bearle and Gardiner Means articulated this change by advancing the proposition that large corporations were based on the separation of ownership from management and that an important role for accounting and auditing was to properly value the proprietary interest of the corporation. In the context of this new idea of the corporation, the auditor’s primary duty was to serve the needs of the collective proprietary interest rather than a specific absentee-ownership interest. This collective proprietary interest essentially comprised domestic shareholders, that were often large banks or wealthy investors, but increasingly the general public has become involved in stock ownership.The passage of the federal securities acts during the New Deal era, and the creation of the SEC, led to another transition in the concept of auditor independence. The SEC’s most important effect on auditor independence der ived from its efforts to establish standards for financial reporting and auditing. Because of these efforts, public accountants and auditors no longer accepted that their primary responsibility was to a specific absentee owner, or to a collective proprietary interest, but rather to a set of professional standards established for the preparation and audit of financial statements. The concept of auditor independence shifted in favor of objectivity and neutrality in the reporting of the financial position and the results of operations, rather than loyalty to a particular party. This view was articulated academically and intellectually by Professor W.A. Paton, who stressed the entity view of corporate financial reporting.The objective and neutral concept of auditor independence prevailed until the 1970s, when FASB was established as the authoritative independent accounting standards setter. From approximately that time, public accounting firms began to modify their objective and neutral focus and started advocating for their audit clients with regard to accounting and auditing matters. Simultaneously, the rapid growth of business enterprises on a worldwide basis provided large public accounting firms withan opportunity to become the preferred providers of a wide spectrum of business services, the revenues from which quickly outpaced the fees from traditional auditing services. While the standards issued by the Auditing Standards Board (ASB) of the AICPA continued to stress independence from clients, the increasingly competitive marketplace for audit services, along with the complexity of international business practices, led some auditors to reduce their focus on objective and neutral interpretation of accounting standards in favor of becoming a trusted advisor for clients.Subsequent to the accounting and auditing scandals of the early 2000s, and the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOA), the idea of auditors as trusted advisors appears to have become increasingly unsustainable. The parameters of a potentially new concept of auditor independence are still unfolding, but the Public Companies Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) seems to be stressing a concept of auditor independence that emphasizes a greater degree of separation between registered auditors and client management.Prior Debates About Auditor IndependenceThe second half of the 20th century saw various debates in both the academic and the professional literatures about auditor independence. One argument pertaining to auditor independence developed from idealized views of professionalism that emerged historically in both the British and the American accounting professions. For example, Thomas A. Lee, in Company Auditing, 3rd ed. (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1986, page 89), suggested the following:An honest auditor will behave like someone who is independent, using independence to mean an attitude of mind which does not allow the viewpoints and conclusions of its possessor to become reliant on or subordinate to the influence and pressures of conflicting interests.Unfortunately, this admirable expression about auditor independence does not acknowledge that an auditor’s state of mind is not determinable, and, therefore, to conclude whether an auditor is independent pursuant to Lee’s definition is impos sible.P. Moizier, in “Independence” (in Current Issues in Auditing, edited by M.Sherer and S. Turley, Paul Chapman Publishing Ltd., 1991), argued for an economic rationale for auditor independence, which was summarized as follows: There is an expectation that the auditor will have performed an audit that will have reduced the chances of a successful negligence lawsuit to a level acceptable to the auditor. In the language of economics, the auditor will perform audit work until the cost of undertaking more work is equal to the benefit the auditor derives in terms of the reduction in the risk of a successful lawsuit being possible. This then represents the minimum amount of work that the reader can expect the auditor to perform. However, all auditors are individuals with different attitudes to risk and return and so one auditor’s minimum standard of audit work will not necessarily be that of a colleague.This economic argument, while logical, would be unsustainable if certain auditors took advantage of the general presumption regarding auditor independence in order to obtain increased market share. In other words, for the economic argument to be effective, complete compliance with the principle of auditor independence would be required.In contrast to the professional and economic arguments for auditor independence, R.W. Bartlett, in “A Heretical Challenge to the Incantations of Audit Independence” (Accounting Horizons, vol. 5, No. 1, 1991), suggested that auditing is a sort of ceremony involving incantations about independence. Bartlett argued that there have been four kinds of “incantations” regarding auditor independence:The “smoking gun.” This is the argument that only in a few documented instances has auditor independence been found to be implicated in audit failures, at least if one accepts the evidence provided by lawsuits and prosecutions of auditors for securities fraud. Most lawsuits and prosecutions of auditors have been based on assertions of incompetence or lack of due diligence in the application of auditing standards, rather than lack of independence. An inability to obtain access to detailed records of lawsuits and other evidence about audit failures, however, makes this incantation difficult to prove.“We are doing pretty good.” Based on public o pinion surveys, the publicaccounting profession has generally been held in high regard. Public opinion polls assessing the esteem of the profession often address issues like objectivity, reliability, and honesty, rather than independence perse. While objectivity, reliability, honesty, and independence may overlap, what “independence” actually means to the general public is unclear. Often, the public is not well informed about what auditors do.The “public good.” This incantation suggests that if too many constraints are placed on the public accounting profession’s scope of services, accounting firms will be unable to serve clients properly, thereby imposing significant costs on the public. Some public accounting firms have argued that providing nonauditing services allows them to perform better audits because they can obtain a better understanding of the client’s systems.“Trust us.” Independence is often said to be a mental state possessed by professional accountants and therefore not subject to empirical observation or quantification. This incantation is based on the idea of auditor economic self-interest; that is, auditors are assumed to maintain independence and objectivity so as not to harm their longer-term economic interests. This assumes that auditors continually evaluate the costs and benefits associated with ethical behavior and always resolve conflicts in favor of behaving ethically because doing so produces the greatest long-term economic benefit. While these assumptions may be argued, it can also be observed that the individual economic calculus of a particular auditor may weigh in favor of retaining an important client rather than being objective and independent, thus undermining the “trust us” argument.Changes in the Market That Affected Auditor IndependenceJonathan Weil, in “Behind Ways of Corporate Fraud: A Change in How Auditors Work” (The Wall Street Journal, March 25, 2004), suggests that during the 1970s and 1980s the market for audit services and the way in which audits were conducted changed, contributing to a decline in auditor independence. The first component of change was price competition. Prior to the 1970s, the AICPA Code of Conduct prohibited auditors from publicly advertising their services, from making uninvited solicitations to rival firms’ clients, and from participating in competitive bidding foraudits. Under threats of antitrust action by the federal government, the AICPA was compelled to remove these prohibitions against competitive practices. As a result, competitive bidding in auditing became commonplace.The second change in how audits were conducted was an increased emphasis on “risk-based auditing.” Risk-based auditing is reasonable in that the largest amount of audit effort is placed on the greatest areas of audit risk. This logical idea assumes, however, that auditors are experts in determining the riskiest areas of a company’s operations. Unfortunately, as Enron and other business failures have demonstrated, some auditors are not sufficiently able to determine whic h areas of a company’s operations are subject to the greatest risks. In addition, auditors using a risk-based approach might not detect fraudulent activities. While this new concept of auditor independence may be appropriate for an auditor in certain circumstances, too often an auditor’s efforts to aid management resulted in misleading accounting numbers that concealed true economic performance. During the 1990s, it appeared that some auditors neglected their most immediate responsibility to act on behalf of third-party investors or, at a minimum, to be an objective and neutral interpreter of accounting standards.Pre–Sarbanes-Oxley Proposals to Enhance Auditor IndependenceA legal prohibition against an auditor possessing a financial interest in a client has been the cornerstone of auditor independence rules in the United States since the 1930s. Until the 1990s, this was not necessarily true in the United Kingdom and some other countries, even though prohibitions against holding financial interests were generally observed in practice because of the standards of the accounting institutes and common law.Currently, a prohibition against auditors possessing financial interests in clients is virtually a universal principle. Both the SEC and the public accounting profession have focused most of their attention regarding auditor independence on defining and enforcing prohibitions against financial interests. Elaborate rules and reporting structures have been formulated for the purpose of revealing any type of financial interest on the part of professional employees of accounting firms, their spouses, theirparents, or their children. The PCAOB has adopted most of these rules, with a degree of relaxation in areas where the rules seemed unreasonable.Rotation of audit appointments. In several countries (e.g., Italy) auditors are permitted to audit a client for only a specified number of years. This type of regulation has never been seriously considered in the U.S. or the U.K., although Sarbanes-Oxley requires that individual auditors rotate off a client on a periodic basis. In France, the concept of auditor rotation is reversed: Auditors are appointed for a fixed period of time, during which time they cannot be replaced. This rule was intended to increase auditor independence, because the auditor has less fear of being fired by the client.With regard to independence standards, the PCAOB has adopted interim rule 3600T as part of its bylaws and rules. Rule 3600T reads as follows:In connection with the preparation or issuance of any audit report, a registered public accounting firm, and its associated persons, shall comply with independence standards:(a) as described in the AICPA’s Code of Professional Conduct Rule 101, and interpretations and rulings thereunder, as in existence on April 16, 2003 [AICPA Professional Standards, ET sections 101 and 191 (AICPA 2002)], to the extent not superseded or amended by the Board;(b) Standards Nos. 1, 2, and 3, and Interpretations 99-1, 00-1, and 00-2, of the Independence Standards Board, to the extent not superseded or amended by the Board.Essentially, the PCAOB has recognized the independence standards previously developed by the AICPA and the SEC through the Independence Standards Board.Reconsidering Auditor IndependenceWhat is needed now is a complete reconsideration of the concept of auditor independence. Such reconsideration might lead to a new concept in which auditor independence would be based on reasserting the accounting profession’s former ethic of being an objective and neutral interpreter of accounting standards, rather than an advocate for client positions. Given the recent and ongoing accounting and auditingscandals, it seems obvious that independent auditors should not be advocates for client positions.A new concept of auditor independence is required that specifically incorporates the propositions that: 1) auditors should not be advocates for their clients, and 2) management should not be able to influence the audit fee and the scope of the audit. Without a transition to this concept, auditor independence standards will most likely be primarily cosmetic and will not provide sufficient assurance that auditors are in fact independent from client management.。