This paper challenges the increasingly accepted position that, internationally,
the audit profession is facing a major liability crisis. Its analysis of
auditing developments in Spain since the late 1980s reveals an audit liability
“crisis” which is more the result of the
profession’s campaign to align itself with legal regimes abroad rather
than a direct consequence of major legal settlements in favour of third parties.
The Spanish experience is made particularly interesting by the dramatic change
in the auditing profession’s stance - clearly rejecting
responsibilities and legal traditions that it had willingly accepted just over a
decade ago (when auditing was established in statute). A major implication of
the paper is the need for notions of “international” and
“crisis” to be used with great care in the audit arena and
for their mobilising power to be recognised, especially given the limited
availability of detailed studies of different national auditing contexts.