Reinventing the Audit Profession for the 21st Century Audit Futures is a thought leadership partnership between ICAEW and the Finance Innovation Lab. Audit Futures and the RSA have come together to ask how audit can serve the society that we want to become. Audit is at a difficult pass. As currently constituted, it assesses and reports on a system of business and finance that no longer enjoys the broad social confidence that it once did. It then reports on it in a variety of ways that miss the big picture. Audit’s foundation stone – the statutory financial statement audit – risks being swept away by events. The retrospective assurance of a clean audit report on historic information in the annual report buys relatively little confidence today. Business fortunes today are assessed on a rolling basis and can fluctuate overnight on the basis of a negative news story or tweet. Yet in this world of unprecedented organisational and informational complexity, audit should be increasingly important. The public, businesses and the financial markets need a body of people skilled at removing opacity in the service of the public interest. The report argues that instead of being a trust-producing product, the audit should become a trust-producing practice in which the auditor uses his or her position as a trusted intermediary to broker evidence across all dimensions of the organisation and its stakeholders, and clarify all aspects of the organisation’s value – economic, social and environmental. The auditor as convenor, will need new skills, and will need to work in a more agile and interdisciplinary environment. Technical rigor will need to be maintained through training and professional support, but qualities like empathy, imagination and moral reasoning will be an increasingly important part of the training and support package. This report draws on interviews and comment from over 200 professionals, inside and outside of audit. RSA Fellows were particularly generous with their time and expertise, and bring a wide range of perspectives to the challenges faced by the profession.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 12:20:23 +0000