Auditors’ Ethics and their Impact on Public Trust

The well-known and widely publicized series of financial scandals have revealed that public trust was deeply eroded with regards to the public's perception of the audit process. The growing mistrust led to questioning the auditor's role as well as his contribution to the social warfare, since the auditor is perceived as an agent acting in the public interest. This raising concern prompted us to investigate within this study if and how the perceived ethics of auditors influence the trust bestowed on the profession by the wide public. The methodology we employed in our demarche consisted in a constructivist analysis and thus, this paper investigates if auditors’ ethics were compromised by conflicts of interest, which could have prevented them from acting as agents of trust. Results show that growing efforts the auditors display cast a positive gleam on public trust. Also, increased regulation, as well as communication between auditors and regulatory bodies are likely to have a positive effect on public trust. In conclusion, growing attention to ethics derives from higher attention to quality.