فرسایش حوزه قضایی: حسابرسی در یک نظام حسابداری ارزش بازار

In recent years, accounting standards worldwide have been modified so as to render them more heavily based on fair or market value. This paper explores the behavioural and jurisdictional consequences of the normative drift towards fair value. Being informed by Giddens’ work on late modernity, trust and expertise and drawing on a series of interviews with Canadian professional accountants, we argue that fair value accounting makes it increasingly harder for auditors to feel and actually be in control of their own expertise. That is, auditors’ system of expertise is now considerably more reliant on a “secondary” – but perhaps in actual fact primary – layer of expertise revolving around market valuation techniques and principles. In so doing, the auditors’ job is increasingly transformed as the involvement of valuators now represents a recurrent and pervasive phenomenon in audit processes.

Generally speaking, […] the auditor's job is becoming harder and more complex. We’re asking our people to do increasingly complex tasks, standards are becoming more complex, and clients are extremely demanding. It's a tough profession, a lot tougher than when I became a partner about thirty years ago. […] I’m beginning to wonder whether the profession will be able to attract the best students, and whether the latter will stay in the profession once they pass the CA exam. (Big Four partner)

Our task was to examine how rank-and-file auditors from large accounting firms have experienced and been affected by the fair value approach which currently permeates most formal standards of accounting practice. Our findings indicate that modifying the core of accounting standards has engendered flows of translations (i.e., different interpretations and ways to implement the new standards), along with conformity and resistance. In all likelihood most of these flows were not foreseeable, as generally argued by Giddens