The modern slavery audit and the inherent biases of auditing

Purpose The paper draws on two audits initiated by the New Zealand Government to investigate practices of modern slavery on board a South Korean vessel fishing in New Zealand's waters. It shows how record proactivity and testimonial injustice work together to bias what counts as audit evidence, thereby privileging perpetrators of modern slavery and deprivileging its victims in contests of truth. The paper argues that the audit is not a neutral practice but is one that is inherently biased against the victims of modern slavery. Design/methodology/approach Our case relies primarily on the audit reports of two audit investigations of the Sajo Oyang Corporation. We reveal and analyze the documentary and oral evidence that the auditors relied on, and did not rely on, in arriving at their conclusions, as well as their justifications for (un)reliance. We argue that the audit as it is currently construed is loaded in favor of the powerful in truth contests between the powerful and the powerless. Findings We provide empirical examples of how accounting records and other documents can be exploited by perpetrators of modern slavey, both to facilitate and conceal it. We show how the audit's dependence on records combined with auditors' management bias underpinned by testimonial injustice, prejudice in the economy of credibility, work to stultify audit verification practices, rendering them ineffective in detecting incidences of modern slavery. Originality/value We introduce the concepts of record proactivity and testimonial injustice into the accounting literature and provide empirical examples of them in the context of auditing. We give a rare glimpse into how proactively produced accounting records are consumed by auditors, and how auditors adjudicate between conflicting documentary and oral testimonies in contests of truth.