Joint-audit proposal: A spanner in the account books?

These parameters are driving government policies worldwide, as today’s investors and other stakeholders expect efficient, time-saving and simplified processes for everything, including audits. Against this backdrop, the government’s most recent proposal of joint audits has become a subject of heated debate, as it’s not even closer to the aforementioned parameters and is in danger of creating more pressure on an already stressed existing audit framework. While some financial experts argue that a joint audit is aimed at increasing competitiveness and quality, that they usher in more transparency and can expand a company’s capabilities, the fact remains that joint audits have been very rare and largely rejected by the EU and other jurisdictions like the US, UK, Indonesia, EU, China, Brazil, Russia, South Korea and Turkey. by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales states, “Government and audit regulators would need to consider support for challenger firms and listed companies if joint audit reforms were introduced. They would also need to establish a process for monitoring shared or joint audits to determine whether competition and choice did, in fact, increase over time and whether there was a positive effect on audit quality.” Challenges and downsides: • Joint audits require both auditors to agree on the group audit opinion, and audit reports can be very voluminous, running into many pages covering all observations and issues.