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State Of Professionalism In Internal Auditing, David C. Burns, James William Greenspan, Carolyn Hartwell

Accounting Historians Journal

The professional status of internal auditing is an important issue. Internal Auditing must possess the status of a "genuine profession" in order to attain the requisite authority to enforce its standards on practice. Until this status is attained, commercial compliance with internal auditing standards will be largely voluntary. A field of work that must rely on voluntary compliance with its standards lacks the "genuine" status possessed by the well established professions such as medicine, law, architecture, and public accounting. This study examines, from a historical perspective, the professional progress made by the field of internal auditing since 1977. The overriding …