The future of public audit

Public sector audit is a vital activity within democratic states, which underpins the relationship between the government and the governed, the executive and the legislature, and different parts of the government. While there has been a lot of exceptional work in recent years on public sector audit, the sector faces new challenges. These challenges include regulatory space considerations, digitalization, the impact of service delivery design change, how audit and accountability arrangements address crises such as austerity, Brexit, black lives matter, climate change, disease in the form of COVID-19 and war, and increased skepticism about the role of audit in society more generally. In this special issue, a group of scholars came together to describe this crisis in public audit, how the current literature addresses different facets of it and show how future research can contribute to analyzing it. This introductory article provides a brief summary of the current context of the “what, why, when, how, where and who” of public audit, before considering the contribution of each individual paper in this special issue to assisting in understanding the crisis of public audit, and finally setting out a conclusion and future directions.