Audits of private companies

In this chapter we review research on audits of private companies. ¹ The topic is important for several reasons. One is that research focusing on public companies may not be generalizable to private companies since public companies differ from private companies along a number of important dimensions (which we discuss in the next section). Thus, it is not clear to what extent findings based on public companies can provide insight and guidance for regulators, standard setters, researchers and users of (audited) financial statements when it comes to auditing in the private sector.