The Auditor's Companion

Book excerpt: "The only reference tool covering all categories of auditing, from financial to environmental auditing, The Auditor's Companion combines succinct definitions of core auditing terminology with more than one hundred expansive discussions of concepts important to auditing, such as the audit society, authority, judgment, logic in auditing, the postulates of auditing, and skepticism. The mini-essays include theoretical explications and insights, sketches of arguments, historical developments, and guidance for further reading. Transcending the framework of a dictionary, this is a hybrid reference book in which succinct definitions and conceptual explorations lock together like a double helix into a coherent whole to satisfy the needs of both novice and experienced auditors. The terminology of auditing covers both the evolving, socially constructed aspects of auditing's purposes, as well as auditing's methodological basis in the abstract, enduring techniques of traditional logic. The book's coverage of terminology therefore embraces auditing's constantly developing socioeconomic roles in addition to its perennial methodologies of reasoning"--