Mythmaking in audit regulation: the Canadian initiative on ‘enhancing audit quality’

Abstract

Although extant literature has provided accounts of regulatory processes that failed to produce new or improved regulation, we know less about how regulators attempt to devise an ‘illusion of regulatory action’ to prevent their initiatives from being labelled failures and deflect public criticism. This study’s focus is on the regulatory initiative in Canada in response to a global post-crisis regulatory trend seeking to address the problem of low audit quality. Despite decisive regulatory responses elsewhere, the Canadian project leaders not only concluded with weak regulation based on problematic assumptions, but they also actively pursued efforts to argue the opposite, thereby creating an illusion of a meaningful regulatory response. By reference to Barthes’s work on mythmaking, we examine the relevant project documents to make sense of such arguments and claims essentially as instances of regulatory actors’ mythmaking designed to diffuse criticism and garner public support. Our findings enable us to offer insights into and consider the role of regulatory myths as important elements in the discursive repertoires by which regulators maintain their legitimacy and authority. We also discuss certain conjectures which increase the likelihood of regulatory mythmaking.