Auditing as a Governance Mechanism for Artificial Intelligence: Institutional Design, Accountability, and Ethical Oversight

The rapid diffusion of artificial intelligence (AI) across organisational and societal settings has heightened concerns about accountability, transparency, and ethical oversight. Existing governance mechanisms, including regulation and principle-based ethics frameworks, often struggle to address the scale, opacity, and socio-technical complexity of AI systems. In response, auditing has increasingly been proposed as a means of implementing accountability by translating ethical and legal expectations into structured oversight practices. The study employs a structured literature review methodology, analysing 71 peer-reviewed articles published between 2020 and 2025, retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, and ProQuest. Through thematic synthesis, the review shows that AI auditing has evolved beyond technical verification towards a socio-technical governance infrastructure grounded in transparency, independence, ethics integration, and professionalisation. However, its effectiveness is constrained by persistent challenges, including algorithmic opacity, regulatory lag, fragmented standards, capability gaps, and risks of symbolic compliance. The study positions auditing as both a central tool and a critical institutional challenge within AI governance, offering insights for scholars, regulators, and practitioners seeking durable accountability mechanisms for responsible AI.