Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand (CA ANZ) welcomes ASIC’s latest Audit Inspection Program Report released today, where the percentage of audit areas needing improvements decreased overall for the 18 months to June 2018 and by up to 13% at the larger end of the audit market, in line with a global trend also seen in New Zealand.

 

“The ASIC audit inspection program plays a very important role in Australia’s economy so that auditors and stakeholders are fully informed on the issues they need to focus on, it’s a sanity check that things are moving in the right direction” said Amir Ghandar, CA ANZ Reporting & Assurance Leader.

 

“It is great to be seeing improvement each time in the raw percentages, which reflects a huge ongoing effort by firms and the profession over the past few years, but we’re under no illusions whether more work is needed.”

 

The New Zealand Financial Markets Authority’s Audit Quality Monitoring Report in November 2018 also showed solid improvement, as well as the most recent International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators’ global survey, signalling audits globally are well on the way to improvement targets.

 

“The real value of the audit inspection program is the richness of the information beyond just the various percentages, which is gold when you’re looking at efforts to continually improve,” said Ghandar.

 

“Australian and New Zealand audit firms together with CA ANZ have been working on identifying the underlying causes of the inspection findings, and then sharing those learnings with the wider audit profession – whether at the big end of town or in small and medium audit practices.”