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Audit of Banks Five Years On
ICAEW has been pushing for market-led improvements in bank and auditor reporting. The past five years have seen progress, but auditors need to do more to build confidence in the financial system.
In 2010 a volcanic eruption in Iceland shut down air travel across much of Northern and Western Europe, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified documents, and Greece received its first bailout as the banking crisis became a sovereign debt crisis.
It was also the year that calls for audit reform grew louder as the public enquiries into the financial crisis turned their attention to the role of auditors. Against this background, the Financial Services Faculty undertook its own review and in 2010 published its report Audit of banks: lessons from the crisis. This was among the first reports published looking specifically at how auditing should change as a result of the crisis. It included a number of ground breaking new ideas on bank and auditor reporting, dialogue between auditors and supervisors and auditors’ role in supporting bank supervisors.