Hållbarhet är en stark trend i dagens samhälle vilket avspeglas i bolagens rapportering då hållbarhet ges ett allt större utrymme. Detta har lett till att den traditionella revisorn utför allt mer icke finansiell granskning och en ny roll i form av hållbarhetsspecialister har vuxit fram. Granskningen av hållbarhetsinformation är inte lika reglerad eller strukturerad som denfinansiella. Detta ställer granskaren inför nya utmaningar vilket kan skapa en ökad osäkerheti granskningsprocessen. Området är dock under utveckling vilket således gör det relevant att beskriva och förklara hur en granskare blir komfortabel i granskningen av hållbarhetsinformation. Syftet med denna studie är att beskriva och förklara hur en granskare uppnår känslan av komfort i granskningsprocessen av en hållbarhetsrapport. För att uppfylla studiens syfte och besvara forskningsfrågorna genomfördes en kvalitativ studie med åtta semistruktureradeintervjuer där respondenterna bestod av hållbarhetsspecialister och revisorer. Metodvalet gav utrymme för att skapa en djupare förståelse för granskningsprocessen vilket är centralt för att beskriva och förklara hur en granskare blir komfortabel. Studiens huvudsakliga slutsatser påvisar att det är individuellt hur en granskare uppnår känslan av komfort i sin granskning. Det handlar om i vilken grad de har kunnat avlägsna osäkerhet. Studien visar även att en granskare i grunden blir komfortabel utifrån den kunskapsamt erfarenhet denne besitter. Vidare påvisas det att i en del fall även är faktorer hos kunden och granskaren som påverkar om känslan uppnås. Slutligen konkluderas att hänsyn bör tas till granskarens individuella egenskaper och dess rådande granskningssituation. / In today’s society sustainability is trending, which is reflected in companies reporting as the part for sustainability increases. Resulting in an increase in non-financial auditing for accountants and the introduction of a new profession, in the form of sustainability specialists. Since the review of sustainability information is not as regulated or structured as the financial one, new challenges have appeared in the review process which creates uncertainties. However, the area is under development. Because of this, it is relevant to investigate how a reviewer becomes comfortable in reviewing sustainability information. The purpose of this study is to describe how a reviewer achieves the sense of comfort in the review process of a sustainability report. To fulfill the purpose of the study and answer the research questions, a qualitative study was conducted with eight semi-structured interviews with respondents consisting of auditors and sustainability specialists. The chosen method provided a deeper understanding of the review process, which is central in order to describe and explain how a reviewer becomes comfortable. The main conclusion of the study is that it is individually how a reviewer achieves the feeling of comfort in their reviewing and it is about the extent which they have been able to remove uncertainties. Another conclusion is that a reviewer gets comfortable based on their knowledge and experience. Furthermore, it is shown in some cases that whether the feeling of comfort is achieved is affected by the customer and the reviewer. Finally, it is concluded that the individual characteristics of the auditor should be considered as well as the current review situation.

Background: The relationship between family firms and auditors is not a topic that is very well examined. This is also a relationship that is extraordinary because they have different aims with the relationship. Since the family firms seek for long and close relationships while the auditor needs to maintain their independence. There have also been several scandals in the past between family firms and their auditor where the relationship has become to close. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the auditor’s role in family firms, how value is co-created and what value that is co-created when they interact with each other. Method: To answer the research question the data in this study is collected through semi- structured interviews. The interviews were performed and inspired by previous studies which we developed a framework on to have as a guideline during the interviews. The participants in the study were three family firms and their respective auditor and the participants were located in the same geographical area. Findings: In this study, we have focused on how and what value family firms and auditors co- create when they interact with each other. The study suggests important aspects of the family firm and auditor relation to facilitating the value co-creation process. The aspects that were revealed as important were the relationship, communication, collaborative, trust, and experience from the auditor. The study also investigated which values family firms and auditors co-create, these were smarter planning, increase of effectiveness, exchange of knowledge, expanded networks, and value for society.

Tax evasion is one of the world's societal problems, which annually contributes to distorted competition when large tax amounts disappear from welfares. High-income earners and companies have managed to minimize tax expenditures through systematic applications, which has been revealed recently by elements such as Panama Papers, Luxleaks and Swissleaks. Previous studies have highlighted a problem that clear boundaries between tax planning and tax evasion do not exist. Whether or not which tax techniques and methods that are compatible with the law has been expressed as a difficulty in understanding the profession of accountants but also in professions such as tax advisers and accounting consultants. The purpose of the study was to investigate how auditors handle the issues regarding the gray zones between tax planning and tax evasion. The study's intention was to review previous legal cases and companies' audit reports to see how auditors have acted and how the court assessed complex legal cases, which were then supplemented with an interview study. This because when reviewing the cases, attention was drawn to the results that led us to interviews in order to take part in the auditor's perspective on the matter. The study was based on a qualitative research method where the results showed that auditors should consult more complex tax procedures with other auditors and tax lawyers to avoid legal consequences. The results further showed how important it is for auditors to keep constantly updated by legislation and regulations as these tend to change over time. The result also showed that auditors should act restrictively and judiciously and have a strict attitude in their working methods for minimizing undesirable situations where irregularities can occur. Auditors must also have a well-designed audit plan to avoid the risk of material errors slipping through the audit.

Magister Legum - LLM / That South African municipalities, in vast majority, are experiencing serious financial problems is well-known to anyone with an interest in local government sector. Given that, the study considers the role of the Auditor-General (AG) in promoting sound financial management in municipalities. The disciplinary perspectives from which the inquiry is considered are law and public administration. The context for this consideration is the North West, a province which is inundated by poorly performing municipalities that are literally on the brink of financial and operational collapse. The study proceeds from the premise that efficient financial management practices are essential to the long-term sustainability of municipalities. The role of the AG is key in this regard in that the latter is a watchdog over state coffers and the pivot of the oversight mechanism over the management of public finances. Furthermore, the AG strives to institutionalise and promote a culture of good governance, accountability and transparency in municipalities. It achieves this through routine auditing and provision of audit recommendations that seek to improve municipalities’ internal controls. However, this purpose gets undermined, and eventually defeated, in the instance where audit recommendations are being ignored. Of concern is that the non-implementation of audit recommendations has become a norm in most municipalities in the North West. The study has considerable breadth in its analysis of this problem by looking closely into three municipalities: Mahikeng, Ditsobotla and Tswaing. It is not immediately clear why this trend is emerging or has emerged. In that note, a resolve to embark on this study was impelled by a sense of commitment to try to understand the real issue behind this trend and to see how best it can be countered. This brings the study to then ask: How can the AG’s recommendations be better and adequately given effect in the North West municipalities? In response, it will be argued that this issue cannot be solved by the AG alone. What is needed, instead, is the development of an action plan, policy and institutional framework that will guide and facilitate the multi-agency approach and inter-institutional collaborations towards addressing the problem. Further argument will be advanced to say that the efforts undertaken to reconstitute and strengthen the legal framework governing the AG through the 2018 amendments to the Public Audit Act do not constitute a magic bullet solution to the dismal downward trajectory across the North West municipalities, as contemporary narratives seek to suggest.

The "dramatic monologue" is curiously named, given that poems of this genre often feature characters not only listening to the speakers but responding to them. While "silent auditors," as such inscribed characters are imperfectly called, are not a universal feature of the genre, their appearance is crucial when it occurs, as it turns monologue into dialogue. The scholarly attention given to such figures has focused almost exclusively upon dramatic monologues by Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and other male poets and has consequently never illustrated how gender influences the attitudes toward and outcomes of communication as they play out in dramatic monologues. My dissertation thus explores how Victorian and modernist female poets of the dramatic monologue like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Augusta Webster, Amy Levy, and Charlotte Mew stage the relationships between the female speakers they animate and the silent auditors who listen to their desperate utterances. Given the historical tensions that surrounded any woman's speech, let alone marginalized women, the poets perform a remarkably empathetic act in embodying primarily female characters on the fringes of their social worlds--a runaway slave, a prostitute, and a modern-day Mary Magdalene, to name a few--but the dramatic monologues themselves end, overwhelmingly, in failures of communication that question the ability of dialogue to generate empathetic connections between individuals with radically different backgrounds. Silent auditors often bear the scholarly blame for such breakdowns, but I argue that the speakers reject their auditors at pivotal moments, ultimately participating in their own marginalization. The distrust these poems exhibit toward the efficacy of speaking to others, however, need not extend to the reader. Rather, the genre of the dramatic monologue offers the poets a way to sidestep dialogue altogether: by inducing the reader to inhabit the female speaker's first-person voice--the "mobile I," in Èmile Benveniste's terms--these dramatic monologues convey experience through role-play rather than speech, as speaker and reader momentarily collapse into one body and one voice. Such a move foregrounds sympathetic identification as a more powerful means of conveying experience than empathetic identification and the distance between bodies and voices it necessitates.

The purpose of this dissertation is to explore the influences of industry dynamic factors (e.g., peer selections) on a client’s subsequent decision to select the type of auditor (e.g., Big N versus non-Big N), following auditor turnover. More specifically, drawing on social norms and social learning theories, I develop testable implications and investigate whether and how industry dynamics have an incremental power in explaining auditor choice beyond traditional firm-specific variables documented in prior research. Using a large sample from years 1988 – 2012, I find that clients are more likely to imitate their industry peers’ prior selections to select the type of their succeeding auditors, consistent with the implications of social learning theory. I also find that clients in industries with stronger industry norms, as measured by a greater proportion of clients audited by Big N auditors in an industry, are more likely to select Big N auditors as their succeeding auditors, consistent with the implications of social norms theory. To my best knowledge, this is the first study to explore the impact of social dynamics measured at the industry level on auditor selection and provide large-sample evidence on the relations between industry dynamics and auditor selection at the firm level. Findings of this study provide insights into the dynamic process of auditor selection in which companies do not make auditor-selection decisions in isolation of one another as often posited in existing literature, contribute to the research on the determinants of auditor choice by incorporating industry dynamics into an agent-principal model, and provide a more comprehensive view of the phenomenon of auditor selection.

In recent years, considerable interest has been stimulated concerning potential conflicts of interest between a company's management and their independent auditors. Many researchers examined the association between corporations who changed their present auditors, and factors such as auditor's opinion on the financial statements, management changes, mergers, financial distress, etc. Some of these research efforts resulted in findings that were inconsistent with each other. The current research was therefore undertaken with the objective of developing a theoretical model of auditor change process and to explain the justification for considering certain specific factors that may be present in an auditor-client relationship. The research design and the methodology for analyses were developed on the basis of the theory on power conflicts found in political science literature and by the use of Wrong's power model on authority relationship. Sources of power such as the size of an audit firm, size of a corporation, the stock exchange membership, the ability of an auditor to qualify the opinion on the financial statements, the ability of the management of a corporation to terminate the audit contract following the issue of a qualified opinion, and change of a corporation's CEO were identified and converted into independent variables. Data were collected from secondary sources on a sample of 200 corporations, 100 companies that had changed their audit firm at least once during the period 1983-85, and 100 corporations that did not change their audit firm during this period. The resulting data were analyzed using the MDS-ALSCAL procedure and logit regression with maximum likelihood estimators. The findings of this research support the power model and its relevancy to the study of auditor-client relationship. The variables, client size, stock exchange membership, and audit firm size were found to have a significant association with corporations who changed their audit firms. However, the variable, change of CEO, was not found to be a significant cause of audit firm changes.

The dissertation thesis deals with describing and comparison of methods of audit of a chosen company’s financial reports in Latvian and Czech Republic, evaluation of legal regulation’s harmonization level, it’s application difficulty according to the enterprise, level of accountancy regulation in chosen European countries and describing application in practice

Den 1 november 2010 avskaffades revisionsplikten för de allra minsta aktiebolagen i Sverige. Reformen omfattade de aktiebolag som inte överstiger två av följande gränsvärden de senaste två räkenskapsåren: 3 miljoner i nettoomsättning, 1,5 miljoner i balansomslutning och tre anställda. Närmare 70% av alla Sveriges aktiebolag omfattades av reformen vars syfte var att minska de administrativa kostnaderna för dessa företag. Nu har det gått 10 år sedan lagändringen och det finns fortfarande en pågående diskussion kring huruvida revisionsplikten ska återinföras för alla aktiebolag eller om fler aktiebolag ska undantas från revision. Denna uppsats kommer att undersöka hur små svenska aktiebolag värdesätter revision för att addera ytterligare ett perspektiv i diskussionen kring gränsvärdena. Syfte Syftet med denna undersökning är att få en bättre insikt i revisionens betydelse för små svenska aktiebolag genom att undersöka vilka för- och nackdelar de anser att revisionen medför samt hur de uppfattar revisionsplikten nuvarande gränsvärden. Metod Vi har använt oss av en kvalitativ metod, där vi har gjort semistrukturerade intervjuer med åtta företag i Borlänge-regionen. Intervjuerna har sedan analyserats med hjälp av en tematisk analys. Slutsats Studiens resultat visar att alla aktiebolag på ett eller annat sätt ser ett värde med revisionen. Studiens resultat visar dock att det inte finns någon specifik eller entydig faktor som är gemensamt för alla aktiebolag utan att de studerande aktiebolagen värdesätter revisionen olika utifrån sina specifika behov. Gällande revisionspliktens gränsvärde så visar studiens resultat att det inte finns någon gemensam åsikt kring hur dessa värden bör vara, men att åsikten är att det är viktigt att det finns en kontrollfunktion. / On November 1, 2010, the audit obligation for the smallest limited companies in Sweden was abolished. The reform included those companies that did not exceed two of the following thresholds for the past two financial years: 3 million in net sales, 1.5 million in total assets and three employees. Nearly 70% of all Swedish limited companies were covered by the reform, which aimed to reduce the administrative costs for these companies. Now it has been 10 years since the amendment of the law and there is an ongoing discussion about whether to reinstate the audit obligation for all limited companies or exempt more limited companies from auditing. This paper will examine how companies value auditing to add another perspective to the discussion around the thresholds. Purpose The purpose of this study is to gain better insight in what pros and cons small Swedish limited companies that has an audit obligation believe the audit entails. The study also aims to get better insight in how these companies perceive the current thresholds. Method We have used a qualitative method, where we have done semi-structured interviews with eight companies in the Borlänge-region. The interviews were analyzed through a thematic analysis. Conclusion The study's results show that all limited companies in one way or another see a value with the audit. However, the study's results show that there is no specific or unambiguous factor that is common to all limited companies, but that limited companies value the audit differently based on their specific needs. With regard to the limit value for the audit obligation, the study's results show that there is no common opinion on what these values should be, but that it is important that there is a control function

Revisorer är en av grupperna som orsakar förväntningsgapet eftersom de ibland misslyckas med att identifiera sina ansvarsområden. Finansiella skandaler har på ett negativt sätt påverkat det förtroende företagens intressenter har för revisionen. Ett ökat förtroende kan bland annat resultera i en mer effektiv kapitalmarknad, som ett resultat av en ökad tillit till revisionen.  Tidigare studier har undersökt om revisionsutbildning som riktats mot allmänheten har en påverkan på förväntningsgapet. Om yrkeserfarenhet inom revision påverkar revisorernas del av förväntningsgapet, har inte studerats i en vidare omfattning. Till följd av finansiella skandaler har det visat sig att det existerar ett misslyckande bland revisorer, eftersom de till fullo inte är medvetna om sina ansvarsområden. Avsikten med studien är att undersöka om yrkeserfarenhet påverkar det här misslyckandet och därmed bidra till ett relativt outforskat område inom förväntningsgapet En kvantitativ studie genomfördes med enkäter som datainsamlingsmetod. Resultatet indikerar att svenska revisorer har en god kännedom, men inte är fullt medvetna om sina ansvarsområden. Resultatet visar dock att det med statistisk signifikans inte går att bekräfta att revisorers misslyckande påverkas av yrkeserfarenhet. / Auditors are one of the groups causing the audit expectation gap since they sometimes fail to identify their areas of responsibility. Financial scandals have negatively affected the trust that the companies’ stakeholders have for audit reports. An increased trust can, among others, result in a more effective capital market, as a result from increased trust to the audit report. Previous studies have examined whether or not audit education directed at the public has an effect on the audit expectation gap. Whether or not the work experience of auditors has an effect on the audit expectation gap have not been studied to a great extent. Following financial scandals, there have been shown to be a failure among auditors, since they are not fully aware of their areas of responsibility. The aim of the study is to examine whether or not work experience affect this failure, and thereby contribute to a relatively unexplored field, within the audit expectation gap. A quantitative study was conducted using questionnaires to collect data. The result indicates that Swedish auditors are generally knowledgeable, but not fully aware of their areas of responsibility. However, the result shows no statistical evidence that indicates that failure of the auditor is affected by work experience.