Auditing Transformation: Regulation, Digitalisation and Sustainability

This book identifies and discusses drivers of auditing transformation, including regulation, digitalisation, sustainability, and individual auditor characteristics. It provides a holistic perspective, discussing these current and highly relevant themes in depth and one by one' and also stresses the importance of the temporal dimension, i.e. offering a historical and a present-day perspective. The book covers several different theoretical perspectives when analysing and discussing how the various drivers affect auditors, the audit process, accounting firms, stakeholders, and so on. Sweden is used as a setting to study the effects of these drivers of transition. The Swedish experience is generalisable to other European countries, with a Germanic origin currently influenced by Anglo-American ideas of auditing. In addition, Sweden provides a research setting with unique access to empirical data. The book is unique in its broad coverage of drivers of transformation, combined with its clear focus on financial auditing. It is informed by a wide range of research approaches, from qualitative interview studies to recently developed machine learning methods. Readers, therefore, benefit from a comprehensive understanding of current changes in the audit industry. The book will be a useful reference work for students of accounting and auditing, as well as for audit practitioners, including both auditors and regulators, and for researchers.