Reducing the regulatory burden for firms will free resources that can be used for productive investments. In this paper, we investigate the effect of a change in regulations, in effect abolishing statutory audits for Swedish micro firms in November 2010, on employment growth in the affected micro firms. The changes in regulations created what we argue is an almost perfect natural experiment that can be exploited to evaluate the effects of the reform on employment growth using a difference-in-difference estimator. Our results show that employment growth is higher in firms which fulfil the requirements for voluntary auditing as compared to a control group of firms of similar sizes that does not, and the positive treatment effect is found for micro firms in all Swedish counties and in all types of industries. We estimate that the reform created 1276 jobs in the three years following the reform. We thus suggest that the current threshold for statutory audits should be increased in Sweden, whose threshold levels for statutory audits are significantly lower than in most other European countries even after the 2010 changes in regulations. Such a regulatory change would, in all likelihood, lead to employment growth in the affected firms.