【正文】 the audit. Without a transition to this concept, auditor independence standards will most likely be primarily cosmetic and will not provide sufficient assurance that auditors are in fact independent from client management. 。 British investors explicitly forbade auditors from investing or working in the businesses that they audited. At the same time, as long as auditors maintained their primary loyalty to the investors back home, the scope of professional accounting services could be reasonably broad. For example, auditors were permitted to keep the books and prepare the financial statements for the entities they audited. This initial concept of auditor independence changed during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, there was an economic shift from capital ing primarily from foreign sources to capital deriving primarily from domestic sources. This change was associated with the emergence of large American corporations in industries such as mining, railroads, energy, and telegraph and telephone. The emergence of large American corporations was acpanied by a change in the understanding of the purpose and nature of the business corporation. In the 1930s, noted economists Adolf Bearle and Gardiner Means articulated this change by advancing the proposition that large corporations were based on the separation of ownership from management and that an important role for accounting and auditing was to properly value the proprietary interest of the corporation. In the context of this new idea of the corporation, the auditor’s primary duty was to serve the needs of the collective proprietary interest rather than a specific absenteeownership interest. This collective proprietary interest essentially prised domestic shareholders, that were often large banks or wealthy investors, but increasingly the general public has bee involved in stock ownership. The passage of the federal securities acts during the New Deal era, and the creation of the SEC, led to another transition in the concept of auditor independence. The SEC’s most important effect on auditor independence derived from its efforts to establish standards for financial reporting and auditing. Because of these efforts, public accountants and auditors no longer accepted that their primary responsibility was to a specific absentee owner, or to a collective proprietary interest, but rather to a set of professional standards established for the preparation and audit of financial statements. The concept of auditor independence shifted in favor of objectivity and neutrality in the reporting of the financial position and the results of operations, rather than loyalty to a particular party. This view was articulated academically and intellectually by Professor . Paton, who stressed the entity view of corporate financial reporting. The objective and neutral concept of auditor independence prevailed until the 1970s, when FASB was established as the authoritative independent accounting standards setter. From approximately that time, public accounting firms began to modify their objective and neutral focus and started advocating for their audit clients with regard to accounting and auditing matters. Simultaneously, the rapid growth of business enterprises on a worldwide basis provided large public accounting firms with an opportunity to bee the preferred providers of a wide spectrum of business services, the revenues from which quickly outpaced the fees from traditional auditing services. While the standards issued by the Auditing Standards Board (ASB) of the AICPA continued to stress independence from clients, the increasingly petitive marketplace for audit services, along with the plexity of international business practices, led some auditors to reduce their focus on objective and neutral interpretation of accounting standards in favor of being a trusted advisor for clients. Subsequent to the accounting and auditing scandals of the early 2021s, and the passage of the SarbanesOxley Act of 2021 (SOA), the idea of auditors as trusted advisors appears to have bee increasingly unsustainable. The parameters of a potentially new concept of auditor independence are still unfolding, but the Public Companies Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) seems to be stressing a concept of auditor independence that emphasizes a greater degree of separation between registered audit