Nowadays, legal auditing in the European Union finds itself facing a great crossroads. Imposed by governments and communitarian guidelines, it is criticized by entrepreneurs for not aggregating value to the business, as well as by society in general which, characterizing legal auditing as a public good, expected it to give more elaborate answers than those which the auditors, closed in by a standardizing and legal-technical framework made up by their professional associations, manage or want to provide to the public in general. Actually, the auditing standards that deal with the planning, execution and evaluation of the auditor's work have been the shelter chosen by the auditors. The auditing profession had unanimously used them as a justification for rejecting the expansion of the functions of auditing to the analysis of the company's viability and the detection of errors and fraud. In this context, nowadays, the function of legal accounting lies under heavy criticism, since it does not provide the public with the "certainties" related to such questions as correct financial statements, the going-concern of the company, the absence of fraud or irregularities, whether the company acted within the law, was administered in a competent way and adopted a responsible attitude with respect to environmental and social issues. The objective of this paper is, then, to present the origin of legal auditing with respect to the European Union and, more generally speaking, to give a picture of the current preoccupations and draw a perspective for the function in relation to the not very distant future.
legal auditing; expectation gap; legal auditor's job; future of the profession