Read the November update from ICAEW Professional Standards.
2022 fee renewals
Please look out for your 2022 fee renewal notifications which will be sent to the compliance principal by email this year. The emails will be sent out in the next few weeks.
Reporting Matters of Material Significance (MoMS) to charity regulators
The Charity Commission for England and Wales wants to see ICAEW audit firms do better at meeting their duty to report matters of material significance including modified audit opinions for charities. In this article, we look at why these reports are so important, and what firms can do more widely to improve their reporting of matters of material significance.
2020/21 AML Supervisory Report
Read our latest Anti-money Laundering Supervision Report to understand the current top findings from our monitoring visits and how to avoid them.
The IC: ensuring accountants play by the book
ICAEW’s Investigation Committee (IC) plays a critical role in upholding the highest standards of practice and professional conduct. We look at the wide range of issues the committee deals with, how it functions on the ground, and the importance of protecting the public interest.
Make the most of your probate licence
Make the most of your probate licence and explore ways to boost your practice with ICAEW’s host of resources including practical hints and tips on marketing your firm and success stories from other firms.
Training day: seeing the bigger picture
Every year members of all ICAEW’s regulatory and disciplinary committees come together for training. Find out why these training days are so important, and how the skills members take away enhance not only their committee work but also their wider professional and personal lives.
Independent governance: What is discussed at ICAEW Regulatory Board (IRB)?
The ICAEW Regulatory Board is now publishing its meeting minutes and papers for you to review.
Risk management: avoiding a costly PII claim
No business or individual wants to receive a professional indemnity (PI) claim. But in a hard PI insurance (PII) market, where a claims history can significantly affect renewal terms, reducing the likelihood of receiving a claim is more important than ever.
Updates from ICAEW’s Quality Assurance Team
Independent Examinations of Charities
Watch this new video from ICAEW’s Quality Assurance Team.
Latest AML Supervision Results
ICAEW is the largest accountancy professional body supervisor for anti-money laundering in the UK. Our strategy is to provide robust AML supervision through a risk-based regime. We focus our efforts on firms where the risk that they will be used to enable money laundering is highest. View the latest AML supervision results for the third quarter of the year.
View from the firms
As a world-leading improvement regulator, we supervise and monitor over 12,000 ICAEW firms and insolvency practitioners (IPs), holding them, and all ICAEW members and students, to the highest standards of professional competency and conduct. After each monitoring review, firms are asked to complete a feedback survey. View the latest feedback results following our return to onsite reviews.
Insolvency practitioner updates
Updates from HMRC’s VAT426 Team on service levels
At the start of October, HMRC advised us that its VAT426 team was testing a solution that would allow it to significantly increase the number of payments that it could make, enabling it to progress cases and payments to IPs. This has helped to address the issues that the team has faced with the movement of work and redeployment of staff.
Since then, HMRC has confirmed that the team has not only been able to reduce its backlogs to within Service Level Agreements, but has gone beyond that, and is now working current cases. There remain a few hundred cases that are more complex and require further intervention so IPs will be contacted by the team to resolve these, rather than just having them rejected.
Over the next few weeks IPs should start to see payments coming out as its Finance teams are now processing several hundred payments per day.
We would like to hear from IPs whether they feel there has been an improvement with the speed their cases and payments are being processed - please notify us by the filling out this form.
Cancelling your VAT registration form – form VAT7
IPs are sending HMRC numerous different versions of the VAT7 postal form, which has been causing problems. HMRC has provided guidance on which form you should be using and what you should be doing with the form.
Account Manager for insolvency related Customs queries
As part of HMRC’s work to improve the customer journey for IPs, it is introducing a dedicated Account Manager for insolvency related Customs queries.
Disciplinary update
As usual, we strongly recommend that you familiarise yourself with the latest disciplinary cases to ensure your firm isn’t making any of the common mistakes that we see.
This month’s update contains a variety of cases including a firm who was fined £17,750 for a breach of the International Standard on Auditing (UK) 700 ‘The independent auditor’s report on financial statements and the International standard on Auditing 570 (UK) ‘Going Concern’. An ICAEW member was also fined £19,600 and required to pay costs as a result of issuing audit reports in the name of his firm in respect of 11 years financial statements of one client when the firm was not a registered auditor.
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