On the Operational Reality of Auditors' Independence: Lessons from the Field
Bibliographic record
Abstract
SUMMARY Auditor independence, which has certainly been one of the most addressed topics in auditing literature, is a complex and ambiguous construct that can be analyzed along two dimensions. The first dimension, organizational independence, relates to auditors' willingness to act in accordance with professional standards and to report errors found during the audit. The second dimension, operational independence, relates to auditors' capability to work diligently and effectively in order to detect material anomalies. Surprisingly, “much of the debate has [so far] focused on the former,” while the latter has remained largely “under-discussed” (Power 1999, 132), if not ignored. In this paper, based on ethnographic data and semi-structured interviews, we examine the realities of auditors' operational independence and discuss the practical and theoretical implications of our findings. Our evidence suggests that auditors' operational independence is both unsettled in practice and impossible to achieve through institutional measures alone. This view may challenge orthodox and regulatory conceptions of audit, but the smooth conduct of an audit engagement largely depends on the auditees' desire to cooperate. In order to arouse and maintain this desire, audit team members resort to a number of relational strategies that aim at securing their capability to work with diligence and efficacy, but that can also undermine their willingness to take enforcement action when necessary. Audit, therefore, appears to be a complex balancing act between capability and willingness. Ultimately, it is shown that because official arrangements designed to guarantee operational independence are unlikely to be effective, the reality of auditor independence remains highly uncertain and needs to be constantly negotiated and renegotiated in the field.
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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 | 0.110 | 0.096 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.092 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.025 | 0.030 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".