Audit is trustworthy: It’s time we stopped punishing it for being human

By CHRISTIAN EKEIGWE

Every time a major company collapses, society reaches reflexively for a familiar accusation: “Where were the auditors?” The question is asked with an air of certainty, as though auditors should have been omniscient, omnipresent, and infallible gatekeepers. But this expectation is not only unrealistic — it is corrosive. It punishes the profession for the very structural limits that define an errable world.

Audit was never designed to deliver certainty. It was designed to deliver trustworthiness: disciplined judgement, principled independence, and courage in the face of uncertainty. Yet we continue to demand perfection from a system that cannot, by design, eliminate all error. No human system can. And no society that understands complexity should pretend otherwise.

The invidious collapse of Arthur Andersen remains the most tragic example of this perfectionist fantasy. Before the facts were known, the firm was condemned in the court of public opinion. The narrative hardened faster than the evidence. Congress later confirmed that Enron’s collapse was driven primarily by insider fraud and governance failure — “an old-fashioned example of theft by insiders,” as the congressional report put it. Andersen’s alleged fault was failure to detect, not complicity, not causation.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned Andersen’s conviction. But the decision came too late. A great institution had already been destroyed.

And what a loss it was.

Arthur Andersen was not merely a firm; it was a centre of excellence, a crucible in which generations of auditors were formed in the discipline of “getting the facts behind the figures.” Its people were innovators in management science, pioneers in operations research, and exemplars of professional probity. A multiuniversity study found that Andersen alumni continue to deliver higherquality audits than their peers, with fewer restatements and fewer signs of earnings manipulation. Excellence, once cultivated, does not evaporate; it transfers, generationally.

Yet negativity bias — the human tendency to focus on the bad and ignore the good — has made society forgetful of the blessings accountants and auditors quietly produce. We tolerate failures in medicine, aviation, engineering, and government because we understand that complex systems sometimes falter. But when auditors stumble, we reach for the guillotine. This double standard is not only unfair — it is dangerous.

Audit is the work of human beings examining the work of other human beings in an errable world. Perfection is not only impossible — it is conceptually incoherent. The only honest promise any system can make is trustworthiness, not infallibility.

Audit is one of the few professions whose work is designed to prevent harm before it occurs. It is a civic technology of trust. It steadies markets, disciplines management, and reassures investors. It is the quiet infrastructure beneath the global economy. And yet, paradoxically, it is the profession most quickly blamed when the world’s inherent uncertainty reveals itself.

A mature society does not demand perfection; it demands trustworthiness. It recognises that failure is not a verdict but a resource — a chance to learn, improve and strengthen the system. Wise managers even design “deliberate failures” to disrupt complacency and provoke fresh thinking when things are going too well. Failure, properly understood, is a teacher, not an executioner.

Audit deserves the same grace.

The profession must also find its voice. When Andersen was attacked, the profession largely stood by in silence. Only after the firm was gone did scholars begin publishing studies showing that Andersen was not as bad as portrayed. The future may judge this silence as a dereliction of moral duty. Responsible, confident self-advocacy is not puffery; it is part of the profession’s obligation to truth and fairness.

We must never again allow a major audit firm to be destroyed by narrative momentum, political expediency, or public impatience. When a firm stumbles — whether through its own errabilities or through the machinations of others — the profession must rally with vigorous advocacy. Closure should not be an option. These firms, particularly the Big 4 (from Big 8 to Big 6, Big 5, then now) are our centres of excellence, the breeding grounds of our best and brightest, where pragmatic muddling-through produces innovation despite inherent uncertainty.

A closing defence of the profession must protect audit from the perfectionist fantasies that no system could ever satisfy. In an errable world, demanding certainty from auditors is not only unrealistic — it is civically corrosive. 

It punishes the profession for the very structural limits we all know exist. The honest promise of audit is not infallibility but trustworthiness: disciplined judgement, principled independence, and courage in the face of uncertainty.

Accounting and audit produced the ballast of trust on which civilization thrived and thrives – no contretemps of financial crisis will challenge that historicity. A fair society should not allow itself to be overcome by the power of bad to the extent of ignoring such profound history. Fairly valourising the role of accounting and audit will bring more progress than the current culture of vilification in the society because, as David Brooks wrote, ‘tales of the excellent can lift the ambition of the living.”  

Audit is Trustworthy, not perfect.“And Arthur Andersen — the person, the firm, and the people — were excellent.

• Ekeigwe is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria and Certified Public Accountants of Massachusetts, USA

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