Comment # 1 on bug 981005 from Christian Boltz

I found the problem by running "auditd -f":

# auditd -f
Config file /etc/audit/auditd.conf opened for parsing
log_file_parser called with: /var/log/audit/audit.log
/var/log/audit/audit.log permissions should be 0600 or 0640
The audit daemon is exiting.

(The "wrong" permissions were caused by a manual chmod, so nothing to fix in
this area.)

Nevertheless, it would be nice if auditd would print the correct error message
when started with systemd ;-) - that would have made it much easier to find out
why it refused to start.