European Audit Reform: Where are the Academics?

Audit research often refers to regulatory developments to justify its scientific contribution. The French Financial Security Act (Loi de Sécurité Financiere, LSF), SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act), and more recently the EC Green Paper on audit policy are, for example, among the research motivations found in academic articles. Although institutional and managerial contributions are regularly highlighted in such articles, the real impact of these studies on actual practice is rarely assessed. The present article analyzes the ways in which academic researchers have contributed to the development of the new European statutory audit framework. We perform our study by analyzing both direct and indirect impacts. We assess the direct impact by examining academic researchers' participation during the consultation stage of the regulatory process. The indirect impact is examined via quantitative and qualitative analyses of academic literature, in which we compare the research to the final rules adopted by the regulator. Our results show that academic contributions have had a limited effect on the development of the recent European audit reform.