A notion of auditor independence, envisaged as crucial to the credibility of the audit function, resides in professional Codes of Ethics in much of the western world. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the auditor independence construct has been imported eastwards and incorporated into...

This paper analyses what is seen as a crisis of authority in financial reporting. It considers the view that an element of authority may be restored to accounting through communicative reason. The paper argues that the justice‐oriented rationality of traditional, Habermasian, communicative...