The final report discusses “audit firm transparency reporting,” which is a practice “employed by audit firms to be transparent in their own reporting to investors and other stakeholders about the firm itself, notably, with respect to firm governance and elements of their system of quality control for their financial statement audits.”
According to the final report, an audit firm transparency report should contain information that is:
“[C]lear, useful and presented in sufficient detail to be meaningful to the different groups of likely users of the report.”
“[F]act-based and not potentially misleading.” “[U]nbiased and not oriented toward marketing or selling services.”
“[C]oncise, specific to the firm and avoids the use of boilerplate language.” “[T]imely, accurate and complete.”
“[B]alanced in communicating the audit firm’s output measures of audit quality in addition to any input measures.”
“[S]ufficient in terms of explaining the limitations of the indicators of audit quality, including that the indicators may not be comparable across audit firms.”
For more information, see the press release and final report on IOSCO’s Web site.
