ABSTRACT
As Woolf (1997: 129) in his textbook put it: ‘It is natural for every discipline to develop its own terminology and auditing is no exception. There is, however, a degree of confusion arising from differences in usage.’ Nowhere is this more the case than with regard to the so-called ‘balance sheet audit’. We noted earlier in the context of the systems approach, that the textbooks and perhaps the profession in general were in some confusion in grafting the apparently American inspired techniques onto the standard British bookkeeping audit. The biggest confusion, however, was reserved for the treatment of the balance sheet audit, a term which was, and probably still is, used loosely in Britain, with no clearly agreed definition; an impression which, like the other examples of ambiguity, does nothing for the general credibility of the auditing process.
