Audit and assurance

ICAEW’s Audit and Assurance Faculty has responded to the Financial Reporting Council’s (FRC) consultation on the UK adoption of the International Standard on Sustainability Assurance (ISSA) 5000.

ICAEW is supportive of ISSA (UK) 5000, saying “…alignment with international practice is critical to establish a global baseline to underpin the provision of consistent, comparable and credible reporting”. The response then went on to challenge the government to mandate the standard for all sustainability assurance engagements “as soon as feasible”.

ICAEW argues that for the assurance standard to be effective, it “needs to be part of and supported by a robust regulatory framework” which promotes the consistent application of professional standards, ethics, training, and quality management, along with appropriate monitoring and oversight.

Meanwhile, the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board has published a series of supporting materials on ISSA 5000. The new guidance includes information on how ISSA 5000 interacts with other assurance standards, such as ISAE 3000 and 3410, as well as support on limited assurance and reasonable assurance engagements.

ICAEW members looking for support on ISSA 5000 and sustainability assurance more broadly can now access new e-learning resources as part of their membership. The latest addition to the Sustainability Accelerator Programme was launched at the end of August and is a course focused on sustainability assurance.

Broken into bite-sized elements, the course takes users through sustainability reporting, introducing some of the relevant frameworks. It then moves on to providing a reminder of what the building blocks of an assurance engagement are and describing requirements of assurance standards. Find out more and enrol.

The Audit and Assurance Faculty has updated its guidance on group audits to help continue to support auditors with the significant changes in ISA 600 (Revised). For reporting periods from 15 December 2023, auditors must apply a risk-based approach to all components – no more default scoping based on significance alone.

The new guide provides practical examples of how the new approach works in different group structures and provides detailed guidance on risk-assessment methodologies and component-scoping decisions.

ICAEW’s Professional Standards Department is hosting a series of webinars sharing insights from its latest Audit Monitoring Report. For those who missed the webinar looking at larger audit firms and complex audits, the highlights have been published as an article. The final webinar in the free series is on 23 September and looks at ISQM1 implementation.

Finally, members who would like to contribute to ICAEW’s response to the government consultation on the UK Sustainability Assurance Regime, have until 10 September to email tdaf@icaew.com with their thoughts.

Latest insights articles:

Tax

Data published by HMRC in August reveals that close to three million sole traders and landlords will need to comply with Making Tax Digital (MTD) for income tax, of which 864,000 will need to keep digital records and submit quarterly returns from April 2026. In two separate articles, we explore the challenges facing taxpayers, agents and HMRC and explain how agents can access from support from HMRC. You can learn more about MTD for income tax at our MTD hub.

HMRC continues to contact taxpayers where it believes that errors have been, or could be made in returns. Areas of interest to HMRC in August included: individuals claiming tax relief for personal expenditure in error; mistakes in calculating capital gains tax liabilities; and errors made in applying the associated companies rules.

Finally for August, our article covering a recent decision of the Upper Tribunal is a timely reminder of the need to proceed with caution when using AI. The taxpayer was reprimanded for submitting a draft skeleton argument to HMRC, prepared using AI, that referred to three fictitious tax cases.

Looking ahead, ICAEW’s Tax Faculty will be responding to consultations on draft legislation for Finance Bill 2025/26 on or before the government’s deadline of 15 September 2025. We will draw out the key points from ICAEW’s responses on the reform of inheritance tax, agent representation and measures targeting tax advisers facilitating non-compliance in future articles.

Latest tax news: