AbstractSince the stock market crash of 1929, the auditing profession has rapidly emerged in advanced economies. The procedures of the profession have generally evolved out of political processes without the systematic guidance of a cohesive conceptual framework. That eclectic approach has produced generally accepted accounting principles that encourage publication of global organizational performance assessments such as net income that have little obvious connection to the concrete processes they purport to describe. The approach, furthermore, allows fragmented and disconnected auditing procedures. This paper presents an interpretive and analytical study of auditing in organizations and societies. A systematic conceptual framework of auditing based on observable, measurable entities is developed through living systems theory. This approach provides a means of applying to auditing the well developed investigation methods and procedures of the sciences.