The Drivers of Audit Quality

The Financial Reporting Council is charged, through the Audit Inspection Unit, with monitoring audit quality. However, ‘audit quality' is intangible, with no agreed defi nition. Although the ACCF meeting came to no unequivocal resolution, it was agreed that an overiding aspect of audit quality was the quality of the individuals conducting the audit, at all levels of the audit team. It related to their understanding of the business, their objectivity and scepticism, and their ethical stance and the culture of the audit fi rm. Assessing audit quality is just as diffi cult as defi ning it. Members of the audit committee, as independent non-executives at a remove from the business, are less able to do this than are the company's executives. Thus the audit committee needs to rely in part on management in its evaluation of the auditor