Utilitarianism; Motivational Values and Audit Commercialization: Evidence of the Audit Private Sector

The audit profession has a responsibility to protect public interests, this responsibility has been questioned because the audit industry seems to be becoming increasingly commercial. The evidence of Iran's audit market shows that new customer attraction is very important for audit firms. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to firstly examine the auditors' point of view about the commercialization of the audit profession and secondly to examine the relationship between the auditor's utilitarianism and his motivational value and the impact of these two on audit commercialization. The statistical population of this study includes managers and audit partners working in private audit firms, and a sample of 146 was selected from this population. The methodology of the current research is descriptive and its instrument is a questionnaire. Hypothesis testing has also been done through the method of structural equations. The results of this study show that auditors' tendency to commercialize the auditing profession is influenced by their self-interest. Also, auditor’s motivational values have a positive and significant effect on the auditor's self-interest, but it does not have a significant effect on the commercialization of the auditing profession