The Politics Of Financial Auditing

Accounting is an important factor in recent transformations in the management of economic life in Romania. A marked convergence between private and public sector philosophies of administration has occurred and accounting has given operational substance to ideals of „efficiency”, „value for money”, „competitiveness” and „accountability”. Accounting increasingly shapes the language of policy and has become as much an indisputable benchmark of rational economic conduct as a substantive practice. However, to suggest that accountants have been integral to the new financial performance culture in which we now seem to live is also to reveal an irony. Two of the professional tasks which are closely associated with the image of these champions of performance are currently undergoing a crisis of „performativity” themselves. Financial accounting and audit, practices through which the wider dissemination of a „financial rationality” has occurred, are being questioned as never before. In this essay we focus upon the varied processes of negotiation, debate and accusation which constitute a „politics of financial auditing”.