Özet:

Independent audits of the financial statements are essential for the purpose of making the existing accounting systems more effective and providing transparent, comparable, reliable and accurate information. However, due to the audit scandals experienced in recent years, the independence of the independent audit firms that make the audit has become questionable. In particular, the independence of independent auditors was questioned. Following these scandals, a number of legal arrangements have been made, in particular to protect the independence of independent auditors.

The aim of this study is to evaluate the results by conducting a content analysis on the academic studies about auditor independence which is of great importance for independent audit studies. Within the scope of the study, 234 academic and full text articles that have “auditor independence” in their titles were examined through the EBSCOHOST database about auditor independence. Afterwards, content analysis and author analyzes of these articles were performed. As a result of the analyses, it was seen that most of the articles (27 articles - 11.54%) were published in 2020; most of them (16 articles - 6.84%) were published in Managerial Auditing Journal and the theoretical research method was used more common in the studies. However, it was observed that the studies that used survey and modeling methods were also significant. It has been observed that the studies mostly examined the issue of auditor independence in general. The studies that examined auditor independence specifically mostly handled the subject in terms of auditor rotation and audit quality.

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