Thomas Carrington

• PhD
• Professor at Åbo Akademi University

Supervisor feedback is essential for training and socialising early career auditors. One fundamental aspect and choice of a supervisor's feedback practice and style is whether to focus on encouraging good or discouraging poor performance. We acknowledge that early career auditors likely receive feedback on both good and poor performance in ongoing...

By collecting and analysing survey data from newly employed audit assistants at the largest accounting firms in Sweden, this chapter aims to analyse key aspects of becoming an auditor. The study investigates the characteristics of these audit assistants and to what extent their opinions coincide with the opinions of other highly educated citizens....

Purpose This paper aims to analyze the process of producing a reported profit number to understand how different actors overcome the tensions arising from the often conflicting value frames that apply in different situations during this process and how the actors can benefit from the ensuing friction. Design/methodology/approach The tensions found...

International pressures on Supreme Audit Institutions (SAIs) to fight corruption are increasing. Nevertheless, SAIs lack a clear mandate and may appear ineffective in their anticorruption work. Using an institutional approach, this paper compares the cases of seven SAIs from Scandinavian, South-European and African countries to better understand ho...

Based on an analysis of questionnaire data from a large sample of certified auditors, this study examines how the main type of client being served influences auditor conformity to the core values of their profession. We contrast auditors of (primarily) listed companies with auditors of (primarily) single member companies, that is, limited liability...

This article analyses survey data regarding the impact of supreme audit institutions’ (SAIs) performance audit on public administration in four Nordic countries. Regression analysis with pooled data from Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden indicates that performance audits have positive impacts on usefulness, changes, improvements and, to some exte...

Assurance is becoming increasingly popular as a way to enhance the confidence of sustainability reports. But what does assurance of sustainability reports mean? To answer this question, the chapter treats assurance as a word with a regulatory and etymological history, which prescribes a specific and particular interpretation of the term assurance....

Since the 1970s the Supreme Audit Institutions (SAI) have gradually expanded their role as external controllers of the public administration. Instead of merely controlling whether accounts are according to standards they have taken on a role as evaluators with a mandate to assess whether the public administration works economically, efficiently and...

Based on the theory of professional competition, this paper identifies and investigates four strategic options of supreme audit institutions (SAIs) through a case study of four Nordic national audit offices: a performance auditing strategy; a financial auditing strategy; a portfolio strategy; and a hybrid strategy. The analysis of the Nordic SAIs s...

The legitimacy of politicians and the public administration is imperative in democratic societies. If citizens do not trust the way their taxes are administered. If they suspect that politicians and civil servants work in an inefficient and wasteful manner or simply steal their money they lose faith in the system. If this happens other, alternative...

Research into the tension between professionalism and commercialism in the accounting profession is inconclusive and warrants greater attention. How to conceptualize and measure these constructs are thus pressing concerns. Using questionnaire data from 1,646 auditors in Sweden, and applying confirmatory factor analysis and structural regression mod...

The aim of this paper is to analyze the demands on a sufficient audit. Previous research has suggested that the production of comfort is not only about producing an audit according to ‘the manual’ but that professional aspects such as the appearance of the auditor also are of importance. In practice the relationship between, and the relative import...

Purpose The aim of this paper is to investigate how top management is constructed as a good steward of its company at the annual general meeting (AGM) and how accounting is used in the course of this process. Design/methodology/approach To meet these aims the authors attended 36 AGMs of Swedish listed companies. The interactions that occurred at t...

The sociological strand of auditing research has pointed to some difficulties of the American Accounting Association's (AAA) (and mainstream) definition asserting that auditing is about 'objectively obtaining and evaluating evidence regarding assertions about economic actions' (AAA, The Accounting Review, Suppl., 1972, p. 18). Instead, auditing has...