Keith Houghton

Keith Houghton is Professor of Business Administration at The Australian National University within the Crawford School, the University’s public policy school housed in the nation’s capital. For eight years Professor Houghton served as Dean of the University’s College of Business and Economics and its antecedent bodies. He has been one of two independent reviewers of the Australian audit practice of the accounting firm KPMG prior to the formal oversight by Australia’s corporate regulator ASIC.

He is also a former member of the Australian Centre of Audit and Assurance Research (ANCAAR) and a former member of the Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (AUASB) in Australia.

The Future of Audit »

Keeping Capital Markets Efficient

Publication date: August 2010
At a time when increased independence requirements for auditors, legal backing for auditing standards, and increased audit documentation requirements have occurred, this book examines key issues in the market for audit services in Australia. It investigates issues including: the understandability of audit and the state of the audit expectations gap; auditors’ business acumen and industry expertise; the auditors’ use of materiality; whether or not the increasingly prescriptive nature of auditing is creating a distraction from the ‘real’ audit task and stifling auditors’ judgement; whether or not CLERP 9 reforms involving audit partner rotation and restrictions on non-audit service provision are efficient and effective and reactions to the increasing scrutiny of auditors and audit firms by regulators. With its thorough coverage of contemporary issues, this book intersperses the authors’ summaries, interpretations and recommendations with the perceptions, expressed in their own words in order to faithfully convey their candid assessments, of users of audit reports, purchasers and suppliers of the audit product, auditing standard setters and regulators of the audit market.

Ethics and Auditing »

Publication date: June 2005
Ethics and Auditing examines ethical challenges exposed by recent accounting and auditing ‘lapses’ through a study of interconnected moral, legal and accounting issues. The book aims to engage a broad readership in the discussion of audit failure and reform. With its range of intellectual and practical perspectives, Ethics and Auditing provides critical analyses of auditor independence, conflicts of interest, self-regulation, the setting and enforcing of auditing standards, and ethics education.