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Understanding Audit Reporting Changes

In:

Submitted By mxd0605173
Words 2093
Pages 9
To change or not?
By Karim Jamal + Shyam Sunder
Illustration: Susanna Denti

Has the time come to change the auditor’s report to develop a different grading system and increase the value of auditing to society?
Regulatory attempts to improve the functioning of capital markets often try to make corporate activities more transparent. The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) invited comments on its proposals contained in “Improving the Auditors Report,” with an exposure draft expected to be issued by June. These proposals are intended to make the audit report more useful, and to better communicate the role of auditors. Auditors’ boilerplate, essentially pass/fail, reports reveal little of the fine-grained understanding they gain about the inner workings of their clients, including internal controls, accounting policies, disclosure and governance.
The IAASB proposes to replace the current three-paragraph standard by a new four-page report that will add two new elements: an opinion about management’s use of the going concern assumption and an auditor commentary. The rationale for this five- or six-fold expansion under the proposal is that the commentary should help users better understand the audited financial statements and the audit. A sample report in the proposal includes comments on litigation, goodwill, financial instruments, and audit strategy for verifying revenue, receivables and cash receipts, the entity’s internal control over these items, involvement of other auditors, responsibilities of management and responsibilities of the auditor.
Repeated burials do not seem to prevent some bad ideas for audit regulation from being resurrected periodically.
Auditor opinion on the going concern and financial viability of a company is one of these zombies. The going concern assumption already undergirds a clean audit report,

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