The purpose of this study is to investigate the perception of auditors regarding their responsibilities and potential liabilities to third parties in the case of failure to detect fraud/material misstatements and report the findings to the appropriate party. The study proposes that auditors’ perception of their own responsibilities will depend on the level of litigation threat expected by the auditor based on his or her position in the audit firm. The questionnaire was sent to the big 4 audit firms, the global audit firms other than the big 4, and to 189 different sized local audit firms registered with the Saudi Organization of Certified Public Accountants (SOCPA). The findings of this study revealed significant variations among auditors with regards to their perceptions of their own responsibilities and liabilities to financial statements’ users affected by their expected level of exposure to litigation risk.

Operational audit plays an important role on managing governmental budget. It helps control government spending and other important budgetary issues. This paper presents an empirical study to find out the possible barriers on implementing operational audit. The proposed study distributes some questionnaires among supreme audit court of auditors and analyzes the questions. The results indicate that many governmental organizations are not strongly committed to rules and regulations. There are not sufficient standards on auditing programs and many governmental agencies do not even use operational budgeting system since they are not aware of the benefits of such system. There are some of the most important challenges of having operational budgeting and paper suggests some guidelines for having better regulation on removing the main barriers.