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Human beings began to consume resources unlimited in their production activities since the industrial society. As they discharge pollutants into the environment, leading the environment to becoming more and more deteriorating,environmental damage has occurred frequently, people become to aware of the danger of the damage, more and more concerned about the environment which they survival and development. So people become to pay more attention on the pollution of the major manufacturers– companies. From the 1950s to 1960s, the western industrial was in development and environmental pollution stage, which occurred one after another environmental hazards that shocked the world, people have to deeply reflect on the appropriateness of the human development philosophy ,whether the possibility for arbitrary, unrestrained use of the earth’s resources, free to damage the earth’s ecological environment or not. Humans have to raise the question of how to treat the earth, how to deal with the grim task of the natural environment.Facing of increasingly serious environmental problems, many countries’ governments around the world begin to inter-state dialogue and consultation. On June 5, 1972, the First General Assembly international environmental protection-the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm,the capital of Sweden, adopted the "United Nations Conference on the Human Environment Declaration", the meeting is the human milestone on environmental protection. On March 5, 1980, the United Nations issued an appeal to the world: the need to research the natural, social, ecological, economic as well as the use of natural resources in the process of the basic relations, to ensure that the global sustainable development.In 1994, the State Council, for the first time ,in "the 21st Century of China Agenda " carried out the implementation of the strategy of sustainable development and provide a program of action;17th National Congress of Chinese Communist Party clearly make scientific development guide that is China’s economic and social development of guidelines, the basic requirements is a comprehensive, coordinated and sustainable, adhere to the development of production, affluent life and civilized development mode, building a resource-conserving and environment-friendly society and realize the coordination between speed and quality of the structure , harmonize between economic development and population, resources and the environment, make the people in the good of in production and living environment , realize sustainable economic and social development.On the one hand, the government increases environmental protection efforts; On the other hand improve the use of the audit department of environmental protection on the environment, economic supervision. the theory research of China’s environmental audit was late to start, since the mid-1990s, the government began to explored the theory of environmental audit. Since the mid-1980s, the government start to environment audit, so far the practice is still in its infancy. As the environmental auditing is governmental leading, non-audit businesses, as well as the development of the internal environmental audit develops slowly, but most non-audits are more independence, many staff members, professional high-quality, so has the advantage of carrying out environmental audit of the pre-condition Based on this, the author is to explore the goal of the environmental audit of Certified Public Accountants on the basis of sustainable development theory.In this paper, the whole thesis is divided into four chapters as follows:The first chapter is a brief introduction of the research value, the research background, research methods, the main contents of the framework, the points of innovation, and other shortcomings.The second chapter is the research on the environmental auditing goals literature review. First of all, this chapter begins with the definitions of the objectives of the Environment audit; Second, through the recall of the home and abroad Environmental Audit on the goal of the research literature, using file-research methods, find the characteristics of the study and the main objective of environmental auditing point of view include: "one goal", "dual goal", "three goals" and so on. On the basis of certified public accountants from auditing practice, the author builds a theoretical framework for environmental auditing goal for the following theoretical research. Environmental audit objectives is divided into three levels: the ultimate goal, specific goals and objectives of the project .The Institute of Certified Public Accountants environmental audit of the ultimate goal is to promote economic sustainable development, environmental audit of the specific objectives is to entrust with the supervision of corporate environmental responsibility The discharge is the ultimate goal of the concrete; environmental objectives of the project, including environmental audit of the financial audit, environmental compliance audit and environmental performance audit.The third Chapter is the ways to achieve CPA environmental audit goals. This section is the largest part in the paper, using the survey’s methodology, on the basis of the literature review, the author designed a questionnaire and interviews the CPAs. The main parts of this research are: Firstly, find that the current CPA’s professional background are mostly accounting type of audit, no one has the professional background on environmental science through descriptive statistics. Secondly, the author, on the analysis of the constituent elements of the CPA environmental audit objectives, Using factor analysis, finds that the civil environmental auditing objectives contain five key elements: environmental performance auditing、environmental financial auditing、environmental compliance auditing、environmental fund auditing and environmental management system auditing, it advances and reveals the better proposals.From traditional research, we found two new dimensions: environmental management system audit and environmental funds audit. Thirdly, the author finds four dimensions on environmental factors that affect environmental audit objectives: environmental auditing、accounting standards dimension, the dimension of environmental auditing methods, the external demand of environmental audit, as well as auditors’ability dimension. Fourth, the study found the implementation effects of the environmental audit, including: corporate environmental management dimensions, the implementation of the environmental protection policies and regulations dimension and the use of environmental funds.The fourth Chapter is the conclusions and suggestions. Based on the questionnaire analysis, the study finds that further exploration of Certified Public Accountants to achieve environmental objectives of the audit is difficult. The author puts forward the rational suggestions of the CPA environmental audit.Taking the whole thesis into consideration, there are three major contributions:First, the research method innovation. According to the questionnaire investigation to the CPA firms, the author learns the current situation on the environmental auditing.Second, Compared to former researches, the environmental fund auditing and environmental management system auditing are the new key elements of the civil environmental audit objectives.Third, through the exploratory factor analysis, the author finds two elements which affect the goal of the environmental audit are significant. The elements include environmental norms and personnel capacity.The limitations of this thesis include restriction of the scope of topics and restriction of its content, the research of government environmental audit and enterprise environmental audit should be helpful.
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