Question on IT Auditor Access Rights

We have a guy in our organization who switched from the network administration dept to an IT Auditor position. He expected to maintain the same rights he had previously and when he found out he wouldn’t he has constantly been trying to find a way to get his rights elevated. Instead of asking for access when needed he wants full-time access to everything. His latest attempt was for “read-only” access to the entire domain, including root drives on all servers. My question is: What rights do auditors have at your companies? We want to compile some responses for management to give them an idea of how this is handled elsewhere. Any responses and/or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.