By: George M. Wilson & Carol A. Stacey
Would you expect to find this language in an auditor’s report?
“We performed a full scope audit on seven components representing 99% of the Group’s revenue, 90% of the Group’s profit before tax and 90% of the Group’s net assets.
During our first year as auditor of the Group, we visited all significant locations. For our second year, we have implemented a rotational approach to these visits.”
Or how about a discussion of materiality such as this?
“We determined materiality for the Group to be £30 million.
We reported all audit differences in excess of £1 million.
We define materiality as the magnitude of misstatement in the financial statements that makes it probable that the economic decisions of a reasonably knowledgeable person would be changed or influenced.”
This language may sound like it is from the auditor’s internal conclusion memoranda, but in fact it is from the Deloitte report on the 2016 financial statements of an English company, Marks and Spencer.
Their annual report contains the expanded auditor’s report now required by UK Auditing Standards. The report is on pages 78 to 85 (Yes, it is that long!). It also enumerates several “Key Audit Matters”, describing how each such issue was dealt with in the audit.
While this might seem like an extreme example, there has been movement in international audit standard setting towards more tailored, descriptive audit reports. Here in the US the PCAOB began consideration of changes to the auditor’s report over 7 years ago.
In a May 24, 2017 news release the PCAOB announced that on June 1, 2017 they will consider adopting a new Standard on the auditor’s report. The proposal would eliminate the existing standardized form auditor’s report and replace it with a more tailored report which would include discussion of audit specific issues such as “Critical Audit Matters”. Also to be considered at the meeting are new standards about auditing estimates and using the work of specialists.
You can read about the auditor’s report project and review the most recent proposed version of the standard here.
As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome!
I was at the annual Financial Reporting Conference at Baruch College a few weeks back. A panel member was there from Moody’s and I inquired regarding his thoughts on the proposed new PCAOB auditors report. He answered that he has absolutely no interest in knowing what the major areas audited were and the problems encountered. Those are the auditor’s issues, not his. They are only concerned with the opinion. He said he did respond to the PCAOB’s proposal and told them that the proposed changes are meaningless.