Being an audit professional in the digital age

In this chapter, we explore how audit professionals in transnational accounting firms feel about their professional identity in the digital age. Based on 15 interviews with audit professionals, our findings reveal that despite the dispositional and relational affordances of emerging digital technology, some auditors are experiencing professional insecurities. Our interviewees expressed concerns on the development of the audit profession as a collective as well as audit professionals individually. The former manifested in the lack of trust in their systems of expertise, and the latter in the lack of information technology skills, uncertainty in their career trajectories and ethical concerns due to the decoupling between claims by the firms and actual practices. Discussions on emerging technology tend to focus on its capacity to enhance the quality of audits. Audit professionals are often presumed to have adapted to the epistemic changes, acquired new competence to work with these technologies to maintain their legitimate standing as a professional. This study importantly draw attention to the presence of professional insecurities in this transition process thus, offering important insights and reflection for both the audit and auditors to move forward. The findings provide a basis to understand how and why auditors are renegotiating their expertise and reconstituting their professional role in this digital age. It gently reminds accounting educators to proactively respond to the shifts in the way that expertise is and will be embodied and institutionalised. It also cautions accounting firms against complacency: to construct greater alignment between their recruitment and marketing discourses, and to create a culture fitting to this digital era.