The Canadian Public Accountability Board (CPAB) has published a public inspections report on PwC, Deloitte, EY and KPMG which has found that their improvements could go further.
The report found less inspection findings than last year, however, CPAB continued to find exceptions where there were inconsistencies across the firms in Canada. The report found that of the 86 audit engagement files reviewed there were six that had significant findings, compared to 11 files out of 87 in 2016 and 24 out of 93 in 2015.
CPAB said that progress has been made in the areas of guidance and methodologies to address systemic issues, identify and measure key quality controls and ensure issue escalation processes effectively manage and mitigate risk, which was brought up with the firms in 2016.
This year CPAB is asking the firms to identify and articulate key quality risks, processes and controls in place in order to assess which steps might be missing. The need to fully embed audit approach improvements into every practice and every engagement still requires more attention, according to CPAB.
The report can be found here.
CPAB have also announced the launch of two projects in 2017/2018; comprehensive review of the auditor, and audit committee communications, which will review audit firms, audit committees and preparers.
