Introduction

Auditing today is clearly the most controversial aspect of the accountant’s work. The collapse of Enron, and Worldcom, together with their auditors, Arthur Andersen, has put the spotlight in the past few years firmly on the company audit (Economist 30 November 2002). The scandals across the Atlantic were of course presaged by equally dramatic upheavals in the audit world in Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the performance of Price Waterhouse, the auditors of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and Coopers & Lybrand, auditors of the Maxwell companies and Barings bank, among many other examples of audit failure (Mitchell et al. 1993).