Definition
Auditors of the Imprest were officers of the English Exchequer charged with auditing the accounts of royal revenues and public expenditures, including customs receipts, naval expenses, and military costs. The office was a formal component of the medieval and early modern English fiscal bureaucracy. Over time, their functions were absorbed by the Commissioners for Auditing Public Accounts, rendering the office obsolete. The term is now encountered almost exclusively in historical legal materials and sources pertaining to English constitutional and administrative history.
"Imprest" in this context refers to money advanced from the Crown to public officers or contractors — a form of government loan or prepayment requiring subsequent accounting. The Auditors of the Imprest were specifically responsible for examining whether those advances had been properly spent and accounted for.
Common Confusion
The word "imprest" can be confused with "impressed" (as in impressed service) or with "impress" in its commercial sense. In English fiscal terminology, an imprest is a specific advance of public funds to an accountable officer, not a general loan or debt. This distinction is essential when reading Exchequer records: the Auditors of the Imprest had jurisdiction over this particular class of advance accounts, not over all royal financial accounts.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a term of historical legal significance only. No modern jurisdiction maintains an office called Auditors of the Imprest, and the term will not appear in contemporary statutory or case law except by historical reference.
Researchers encounter this term in several contexts: English constitutional history prior to the late eighteenth century; Exchequer procedure and prerogative finance; and source materials tracing the evolution of public audit functions in England. The office was effectively superseded following the Commissioners for Auditing Public Accounts Act 1785, which consolidated public account oversight into a more modern framework. Any primary source predating that reform may reference the Auditors of the Imprest as active officers; post-reform sources treat the office as defunct.
A key research trap: the imprest system generated its own documentary record — imprest accounts, declared accounts, and related Exchequer rolls — distinct from other classes of royal financial records. Researchers working in the Public Record Office holdings (now The National Archives, Kew) will find the audit trail for imprest accounts under specific Exchequer series. Conflating these with general Exchequer accounts leads to gaps in a documentary reconstruction of Crown expenditure.
The term also appears in secondary literature on naval and military history, because naval victualing and military provisioning were major categories of imprest spending. References to the Auditors of the Imprest in that literature are typically institutional rather than legal, but the legal structure of the office explains the evidentiary significance of their surviving audit records.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Bouvier's Law Dictionary are in close agreement on this entry, both drawing from the same institutional description and both acknowledging the office's supersession. Bouvier cites Jacob's Law Dictionary as a source, indicating the definition traces at least to eighteenth-century English legal lexicography. Neither source provides significant analytical depth, and neither discusses the imprest mechanism itself in connection with the office's function — a gap that limits their usefulness for researchers trying to understand what the Auditors actually did, as opposed to simply what their title was.
Both entries correctly note that the office's functions passed to the Commissioners for Auditing Public Accounts, which is the historically accurate transition point. Neither dictionary, however, identifies the specific legislative moment of that transition or contextualizes the office within the broader reform of English public finance in the late eighteenth century. Researchers should treat these dictionary entries as identification tools, not as substantive accounts of the office.
Jurisdictional Note
This term is specific to English legal history and has no direct counterpart in American law or other common law jurisdictions. Researchers working in Scottish, Irish, or colonial legal materials may encounter reference to analogous audit offices under different names, but the Auditors of the Imprest were an institution of the English Exchequer proper.