Institutes report drop in dodgy auditors
The Department for Trade and Industry today released the annual report on audit regulation from the ICAEW, ICAS and ICAI with standards seemingly improving.
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The paper recorded the institute’s 1,080 monitoring visits to audit firms and found that 91% of those inspected required no action or already had plans in place to improve their audit work.
Only 11 firms this year had their registration as auditors withdrawn following a visit compared to last year’s figure of 18.
The number of complaints about audit work also fell from 94 in 2001 to 80 in 2002.
A large emphasis was placed on the monitoring of the biggest audit firms that handle audit work for listed companies with forty-six of the 100 firms registered with the institutes as working with public companies visited.
‘There has been a great deal of debate about the regulatory framework and there are now a number of proposals for change,’ said John Hobbs, chairman of the Joint Audit Committee. ‘Throughout this period the institutes have continued to operate the current arrangements that have a number of features,initiated by the institutes, to safeguard the public interest.’