Access requirements to the auditing profession in the Member States of the European Union: France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium

This report describes the systems of access to the auditing profession in Spain and other European Union countries representative of different traditions (Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, French, and Italian). Annex 1 presents a comparative table of the different systems, which respect the minimum requirements established in European Directive 43/EC of 2006 but develop and specify them differently. This report refers exclusively to statutory audit as defined in Directive 2006/43/EC.
Auditing is a highly regulated profession of public interest. For over two decades, large professional services firms have expressed concern about recent graduates¿ low interest in the job, which is identified as dull, routine, and ultimately unattractive (Albrecht and Sack, 2000). This lack of interest of younger talent means that it is effectively not the best who enter the profession and the lack of attractiveness of the profession ends up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy (Friedman and Lyne, 2001). This perception of the profession as unattractive explains the drop in the number of students taking accounting-related studies and the drop in the number of candidates taking the entrance exams to the job, for example, in the United States (Financial Times, 2022; Expansión, 2022).

Access requirements to the auditing profession in the Member States of the European Union: France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium Books