A look at Audit Committee Practices

The Center for Audit Quality bills itself as “a nonpartisan public policy organization serving as the voice of U.S. public company auditors and matters related to the audits of public companies”.  However, it was created by the AICPA and remains “affiliated” with them (in the words of the AICPA), even if the AICPA says they are autonomous.

In any event, they are a source of useful information from time to time.

Recently, they teamed with Deloitte to survey 246 audit committee members of larger US-based public companies. Curiously, 30% of the respondents were retired auditors!

Audit Committee Practices Report: Common Threads Across Audit Committees has a wealth of data. It has its flaws (any survey is always limited by the quality of the questions it asks); for example, it asks about the quality of information provided to the committee by both management and the external auditor, when it should have asked this question separately for each group. In fact, I would have liked to have seen separate questions about the members’ satisfaction with reporting by management on performance, the strategic outlook, sustainability, the management of risks and opportunity, information security and cyber, and so…