Audit profession

This report provides a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the audit market in Poland. It features a range of data, including on the estimated number of companies that require audits, the number and type of auditors and audit firms, leading audit firms, and the auditors of the largest companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange.

Traditional audit methods served auditors for decades but as technology advances and stakeholders’ expectations evolve, so does the need for auditors to innovate and transform their approaches in order to keep pace with demand. This publication describes some of the opportunities that new technologies, especially the use of audit data analytics, can offer for audits of entities of all sizes. It also provides a few tips which might be useful for practitioners, Small and Medium Sized Practices (SMPs) and Professional Accountancy Organizations (PAOs) as they support their members.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a particularly important role in the Austrian economy, with commercial banks acting as their main sources of external finance. As SMEs are also very important in the REPARIS countries, analyzing how SMEs and their banks view the operation of financial reporting in Austria could produce some useful pointers for the design of financial reporting frameworks in the REPARIS countries.

This note was prepared as part of the Financial Sector Assessment Program (FSAP) and was made public in January 2016. Its main objective is to describe the status and recent developments in corporate financial reporting framework in Montenegro and highlight key issues relevant to financial sector. The note represents a technical annex to the main FSAP Aide-Memoire and seeks to provide a high-level overview of developments since the 2007 A&A ROSC2, as well as highlight the areas that are most relevant to the financial sector.

Public oversight of audits and auditors is a relatively recent development, particularly in light of the length of time that capital markets and the audit profession have operated. This paper reflects on the rationale for public oversight of auditors, summarizes the relevant EU legislation and international benchmarks for public oversight systems, and thereafter compares and contrasts the different approaches taken by EU member states to operate their public oversight systems.

The document provides a detailed overview of the Internal Audit Training of Trainers program including the Fundamental and Advanced modules as well as the timing and format of the sessions. The training session workshops have two streams: (i) Fundamentals stream with many practical case studies based on the simulated internal audit case designed for the less experienced practitioner; and (ii) Advanced stream for the more seasoned internal auditor with a narrower focus and more involvement in more complex areas.