Environmental audit: theory and practices

Environmental audit is a growth area which has received little attention in the auditing literature. There is currently no mandatory requirement for companies to undergo environmental audit, although pressures on them to do so are growing, and there are no generally accepted standards regulating the nature of audit work. In the absence of standards, the views of individual practitioners will have a decisive effect on the form of the audit. Summarizes the results of a questionnaire survey of environmental consultants aimed at ascertaining what kind of audit work they do and what their views are about the nature of the audit. In particular, examines the contention that there are two competing and incompatible views of environmental audit – audit as managerial aid and audit as an independent critique of environmental performance. Environmental consultants come from differing professional backgrounds – engineers, environmental scientists, accountants and management consultants are all involved in environmental consultancy. Examines the possibility that practitioners from different backgrounds have fundamentally different approaches to the audit. Suggests that practitioners′ views are often contradictory, with little perception of the tension between the two roles suggested for audit. It appears that environmental audit is at a crucial stage of development as a discipline and its future will be shaped by the standards that the new profession evolves.