The Closing of the Auditors Mind?: How to Reverse the Erosion of Trust, Virtue, [Paperback]

Preface. A Note on Methodology. Acknowledgements. Abbreviations. Glossary.?1 Introduction.?2 The marginalization of internal auditing in a post-bureaucratic age.?3 Social trust and the audit society.?4 The corrosion of professional virtue in internal auditing.?5 Numbers, wisdom, and internal auditing follies.?6 Toward a renaissance of internal auditing??7 Concluding thoughts.?Appendix A  Philosophical notes. Appendix B  Aphoristic wisdom. References. Index.

In The Closing of the Auditors Mind?, author David J. ORegan describes internal auditing as an important binding agent of social cohesion, for the accountability of individuals and organizations and also at aggregated levels of social trust. However, ORegan also reveals that internal auditing faces two severe challenges  an external challenge of adaptation and an internal challenge of fundamental reform.

The adaptation challenge arises from ongoing, paradigmatic shifts in accountability and social trust. The command-and-control, vertical hierarchies of traditional bureaucracies are being replaced in importance by networked, flattened patterns of accountability. The most challenging assurance demands of the modern era are increasingly located in three institutional domains  in the inner workings of organizations; in intermediary spaces at organizational boundaries; and in extra-mural locations. Internal auditing continues to cling, barnacle-like, to the inner workings of traditional, bureaucratic structures, and it has little to offer the emerging assurance demands on or beyond institutional boundaries. The reform challenge arises from internal auditings prevailing tendency toward a rigid, algorithmic, checklist mindset that suppresses practitioners creativity and critical thinking. This trend is increasingly narrowing internal auditings intellectual and moral horizons. Under the pressures of these challenges, internal auditing is strugglCÐ