The accounting profession has long faced the issue of an audit expectation gap; being the gap between the quality of the profession’s performance, its objectives and results, and that which the society expects. The profession believes that the gap could be reduced over time through education....

This work investigates the role and contribution of external auditing as practised in the Malaysian society during the forty year period from independence in 1957 to just before the onset of the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. It applies the political economic theory introduced by Tinker (1980)...