Audit quality is all the rage. Recently issued new and revised auditing and quality-management standards emphasise it.
The engagement partner remains ultimately responsible, and therefore accountable, for compliance with the requirements of this ASA (ASA 220.9).
From an audit-engagement partner’s perspective (and public-sector equivalent), the importance of audit quality is reflected in the substantially revised ASA 220 Quality Management for an Audit of a Financial Report and Other Historical Financial Information. It comes in at 42 pages. (Its predecessor was a slim 22 pages.)
It became operative for reporting periods commencing on or after 15 December last year.
Requirements and application guidance have been significantly expanded over its predecessor – ASA 220 Quality Control for an Audit of a Financial Report and Other Historical Financial Information.
The ‘old’ ASA 220 had 17 mandatory requirements, 29 ‘application’ paragraphs describing how they should be applied. By comparison, the new ASA 220 contains 28 mandatory requirements and 119 ‘application’ paragraphs.
The session will:
- Describes requirements of the quality management standard
- Explains how they are implemented, including scalability
- Defines changes to the definition of the engagement team
- Identifies differences from the quality-control standard
- Analyses changes resulting from ASQM 2 Engagement Quality Reviews
- Discusses the demands of other auditing standards that impose specific responsibilities of the engagement partner, and
- Reinforces what the engagement partner must do
This session has been designed for:
- Audit engagement partners and senior members of the audit team
- Those responsible within a practice for quality management
- Engagement-quality reviewers
- Those who conduct quality management on ‘live’ and ‘cold’ audit and assurance files, and
- Audit-partner equivalents in public-sector audit offices.
