Audit Fees and Auditor Independence: The Case of <scp>ISO</scp> 14001 Certification
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study analyses the effects of audit fees and the clients' financial power on the independence of ISO 14001 auditors on the basis of a qualitative analysis of interviews with 36 professionals involved in the certification process. The results of the study demonstrate that most respondents support the legitimacy of the current remuneration system based on the user‐pays principle, despite its business and financial ramifications, claiming that the independence of auditors is in fact ensured by the imposition of contractual duty, the observance of ethical codes, distancing the auditor from negotiations with the client, and dissociating the fee charged for the audit from the granting of the ISO 14001 certificate. However, the study demonstrates that auditors often adapt their behaviour to the client's economic context and the company size, which may call into question the prevailing opinion on the independence and impartiality of the certification process. This paper, on the one hand, discusses the manner in which auditors legitimize the current remuneration system and, on the other, describes the potential threat that it represents for their independence. The paper also highlights the similarities in this regard between the conflicts of interest in the field of environmental audits and in that of financial audits. Finally, the paper analyses a number of possible solutions to reduce the financial dependence of auditors on the audited companies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.064 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".