The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants agrees with the overarching aim of the consultation - ensuring high quality and reliable corporate reporting for healthy financial markets, business investment and economic growth, as well as cross-border investments and the development of the capital markets union (CMU).
ACCA will now carefully
assess the questions of the consultation and look forward to
contributing to the public debate.
Mike Suffield, director of Professional Insights at ACCA says: ‘We welcome the end-goal of the consultation, which is improving audit quality – an issue that remains vital to public confidence in audit.
‘Concerns about audit quality persist, both about those audits that
fall below satisfactory standards and about the pace of improvement. As
UN climate talks concluded
with a deal - the Glasgow Climate Pact – it’s also more important than
ever to foster integrity and trust in sustainability-related information
by leveraging robust, transparent, and trustworthy methods of
assurance. An open and honest debate both at global and EU level is
therefore needed about how audit quality can be maximised and driven.’
As highlighted in its report Tenets of a quality audit
, ACCA believes that the factors that contribute to a quality audit are
varied and include: thoroughness and timeliness; independence and
closeness; standardisation and autonomy; delivering a holistic opinion
and responding to fraud; being both backward-looking and
forward-looking, and supporting both ttransparency and, where
appropriate, confidentiality.
Mike Suffield stresses: ‘ACCA agrees that the main objective of a
high quality and reliable corporate reporting framework should be to
ensure that companies publish the right quantity and quality of
relevant, comparable and assurable information in order to allow
investors and other interested stakeholders to assess the company’s
performance and governance, and to take informed decisions based on it.
We also share the European Commission’s view that corporate reporting
should be seen as part of a wider ecosystem, and therefore welcome the
scope of the EC consultation around three pillars: corporate governance,
statutory audit and supervision.’
‘It is vital to connect reporting requirements with other policy
levers to ensure that business resources are not focused on reporting
compliance but on transforming business models for a just and green
transition, implementing credible strategies that support sustainable
value creation, engendering trust and confidence in them. In the same
vein, we very much look forward to the publication of the forthcoming EU
sustainable corporate governance initiative’, Mike Suffield adds.
The global professional body for accountants is convinced that the
right framework will enable the accountancy profession to play its
essential role in driving positive business change and supporting
economies and organisations across the world to build back better, as
argued in Professional accountants at the heart of sustainable organisations.
ACCA
© ACCA - Association of Chartered Certified Accountants
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