ABSTRACT
Each of the chapters in this book has set out the way in which the statutory audit of companies is conducted and regulated. It can be seen that there is considerable diversity in the ways in which European countries have responded to the issues of education and training, auditing standard setting, oversight and auditors’ liability. The year 2007 has been an interesting one in which to review all these issues, as many of the individual country characteristics are likely to be significantly reduced in the future, with the Europeans potentially moving towards the approach to regulation adopted in the US. In this respect, the US chapter forms an interesting point of comparison, demonstrating both the historical autonomy that individual states have had within the federal structure and the trend towards reducing the extent of this autonomy in favour of a more general, overarching system. The passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation in 2002 has speeded up this trend and increased the powers of independent federal auditing regulators. In Europe it can be seen that similar trends and tensions are also at work, with the extent of national differences arguably declining as Europe pushes towards greater integration within its financial reporting system. Europe’s equivalent regulatory vehicle to Sarbanes-Oxley is the Revised Eighth Directive, which aims to harmonize auditing within the member states of the European Union. It is too early to say whether Europe will inexorably follow the US federalist approach, but that is certainly the trend, with the emphasis on the use of International Financial Reporting Standards and the adoption of International Standards on Auditing instead of nationally based standards. Only time will tell if the world described in the chapters in this book is one that has a fin de siècle feel about it.
