Audit firms and disclaimers: is the bar set too low? - Keith Hooper - Bog

The purpose of the book is show from a theoretical and ethical perspective how the big audit firms have managed to set the bar of culpability so low that they offer only ¿opinions¿ on whether financial statements. Such opinions, are often combined with disclaimers of responsibility. The book explains the background aspects of institutional theory that are relevant to describe how professional bodies construct identical strategies. Such similarities relegate managerial agency, and tend to explain management actions as being both the products and producers of institutionalized cultural frameworks. With regard to the ethics involved in the audit function, it is argued that the concepts of virtue ethics have now largely disappeared. It is a form of Social Darwinism that is adopted by the audit firms. The shift in underlying social values contributes to what the Economist Journal describes as a steady decline in professional ethics.