The Global Audit

Abstract

This paper reviews ‘international accounting’ as it has been defined in the US in the past two decades. Unsurprisingly, a world of increasing cross border flows of workers, capital, and ideas, results in global perspectives in financial reporting practices and auditing. Yet our review of international accounting ‘disappoints’: we find a prevalence of harmonization and comparability issues and, as such, a myopia, restricting the range of potential issues for global accounting practice, research, and education. Audit policy does include verification of immigration regulations whereby US Generally Accepted Accounting Principles dictate that auditors must investigate potential liabilities or penalties that accrue to firms for non–compliance. In reviewing audit practices we conclude that auditors have not fully complied with the spirit of regulations and that this has significant implications for immigration debates. Moreover, we suggest that immigration issues, with inherently complex economic and social consequences, offer many possible contributions for the discipline to consider, as part of international accounting. Immigration debates increasingly include quantification of the costs and benefits of immigration; they include forms of regulation of immigrants in the work place; and they weigh the efficacy of different levels of immigration. Although these issues have been ignored by accounting researchers, we suggest this would be a ‘natural’ domain for accountants, given the role of accounting in providing data, quantification, and advice in numerous international arenas.