Professional Auditor Conscience: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Persistent Audit Deficiencies and Public Trust

Public confidence in audit work continues to be affected by recurrent deficiencies identified in inspections, observations by supervisory bodies and internationally reported audit failures. While these issues are addressed by strengthening professional standards and supervisory mechanisms, certain categories of deficiencies continue to be consistently reported. The existing literature explains these difficulties mainly through structural factors and pays less attention to the process by which auditors transpose ethical principles and professional requirements into concrete reasoning and actions, a gap from which the present paper starts, which proposes the concept of auditor's professional conscience, defined as a professional capacity that facilitates the integration of ethical principles into professional reasoning, professional skepticism and responsibility towards the public interest. Based on a qualitative and interpretative analysis of the literature and reports issued by supervisory and regulatory bodies, the study develops a conceptual framework of professional conscience and a typology of failures associated with it. The paper suggests that recurrent audit deficiencies can be analyzed not only as procedural non-compliances, but also as manifestations of vulnerabilities of the auditor's professional conscience. The paper contributes to the audit quality literature by integrating professional ethics, professional reasoning, professional skepticism, and accountability into a unified explanatory framework, and provides implications for audit practice, professional education, and the work of supervisory bodies.