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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.