Audit committees - thought leadership and reports

This report from ICAEW's Audit and Assurance Faculty considers audit committee perspectives on the nature and extent of corporate fraud and what the corporate sector is doing to improve the chances of preventing and detecting it.

What steps can and should audit committees, audit regulators, investors and auditors in the UK take to improve audit quality? This essay from the Audit and Assurance Faculty examines audit quality in terms of ownership, behavioural aspects, and structural drivers.

This report expands our examination to audit committees in a further six EU countries, spread across the centre and south, with various corporate governance traditions and different sized capital markets – namely Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Malta, The Netherlands and Portugal.

Based on in-depth interviews with audit committee members in seven CEE countries, this report draws out insights on how audit committees are working, how they are having an impact and how they view the future. It provides insights into some of the common challenges still remaining at a time when the role of audit committees is expanding, largely driven by the introduction of new statutory requirements

The ICAEW published the report Audit of banks: lessons from the crisis in June 2010 and committed to produce good practice guidance to enhance the dialogue between bank auditors and their audit committees. This report sets out that guidance. It considers ‘dialogue’ in its broadest sense, covering the fundamentals of a good auditor/audit committee relationship, the structuring of meetings throughout the audit cycle, and the content and style of reporting to the audit committee.

An analysis of audit committee reporting

Given the overall positive change in audit practice brought about by audit committees, this report considers whether: all entities subject to audit should have audit committees; auditors‘ interaction with audit committees should be an explicit part of the audit process of assessing and responding to risks as set out in auditing standards; and auditors should evaluate whether audit committees are effective in supporting the quality of audited financial statements.