International Auditing Standards in the United States: Comparing and Understanding Standards for ISA and PCAOB

International auditing of publicly owned corporations is governed largely by either U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) auditing standards or International Standards on Auditing (ISA) established by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC). In some respects, the U.S. PCAOB and ISA are similar, but in other ways they are not. In International Auditing Standards in the United States, the authors describe key differences between PCAOB auditing standards and ISA. The goal in doing so is to provide students, managers, and researchers with a clear, concise guide to the major differences between PCAOB and ISA standards. Understanding these differences will provide the reader with a greater appreciation of the differences in the auditing process between nations, and a greater understanding of what the audit opinion means as issued in different parts of the world. Asokan Anandarajan, professor of accounting and accounting information systems at the School of Management, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ. He has an MBA and MPhil from Cranfield University, UK and a PhD in accounting from Drexel University, Philadelphia. His research interests relate to earnings management and expectation gap auditing standards. He has published in many peer reviewed research journals including: Accounting Horizons, Auditing: A Journal of Practice and Theory, Accounting and Finance, and Advances in Accounting.