Deloitte paves the way for enhanced audit innovation and quality

Toronto, November 23, 2016 – In its inaugural audit quality report, Deloitte reinforced its commitment to audit quality and enhancing the way audits are performed. The report, 2016 Audit Quality Report: Driving innovation, advancing quality, and shaping the profession, outlines Deloitte’s vision for the future, driven by the combination of innovative audit techniques, deep knowledge of its clients’ business operations and a commitment to audit quality. Deloitte has made significant investments in its audit practice, including the establishment of the Deloitte Institute for Audit Innovation and Quality, recognizing audits will require much more than just working smarter using today’s tools and methods.

“Enhancing audit quality must be more than meeting minimum regulatory and technical standards. Our vision for the future involves clients understanding their organizations better as a result of our audit so they can act with courage to grow and create value for their organizations over the long term,” said Richard Olfert, Managing Partner for Regulatory, Quality and Risk at Deloitte in Canada. “And the ‘audit of the future’ must capitalize on leading edge technologies, analytics and audit methods so the audit keeps pace with a client’s own system improvements.”

To take audit quality to the next level, Deloitte adopted a mindset of continuous enhancement, driven by its own timely benchmarks, metrics and feedback; rather than, by exclusively relying on regulatory inspection processes that occur after the completion of an audit.

Leading the change

Deloitte is the first Canadian professional services firm to dedicate its professionals to serving either public or private companies. Public company audits are specialized and recognizing them as such enables the firm to better serve public company clients by customizing unique training and development. Deloitte’s public company audit curriculum, rooted in the consistent experience of Deloitte member firms worldwide, builds audit skills needed to insightfully understand a company’s business, risks and controls.

Deloitte has also made investments to further safeguard its independence by investing in a broker data import program. The first of its kind in Canada, it automates the daily transfer of the details of its professionals’ personal financial holdings into the firm’s monitoring systems, based on a direct feed from investment advisors. This automation provides current and accurate information to continually assess independence.

These advances stem from Deloitte’s aspiration to be the market leader in audit quality. Placing audit quality at the centre of its culture of continuous enhancement and innovation, drives the firm to make today’s best work even better tomorrow. As a result, Deloitte no longer places responsibility solely on individual audit teams to enhance audit quality. Deloitte also brought advances to how its audit practice is managed, allowing the firm to achieve its objectives as audits go on, rather than waiting for an assessment after the engagement is finished.   

“There’s a lot of talk about audit quality. Yet for all the talk, no one seems to be able to describe exactly what audit quality means or looks like,” said Olfert. “Our Audit Quality Report describes what we have done and, as importantly, how we are seeing the future. We believe that the best way to stay ahead of change is to lead it. We aim to anticipate needs, rather than react to them.”

Investing in the Audit Profession

In the past year, Deloitte invested more than 10 percent of its public company audit revenues to enhance its training and technology for its 2015 year-end audits.

The Deloitte 2016 Audit Quality Report is the first report published through Deloitte’s Institute for Audit Innovation and Quality. The Institute, borne from the firm’s appreciation of the challenges facing the audit profession and its commitment to addressing them, will become a destination for sound-thinking on audit quality and perspectives on how audits should be performed in future. The Institute will release subsequent reports and papers aimed at advancing thought leadership on topics central to audit quality and innovation as well as, offer unique programming concerning the capital markets. The Institute will be a welcome addition to Deloitte University located at the firm’s downtown Toronto office.

To learn more about Deloitte’s 2016 Audit Quality Report, please click here.

About Deloitte

Deloitte, one of Canada's leading professional services firms, provides audit, tax, consulting, and financial advisory services. Deloitte LLP, an Ontario limited liability partnership, is the Canadian member firm of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited.

Deloitte refers to one or more of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, a UK private company limited by guarantee, and its network of member firms, each of which is a legally separate and independent entity. Please see www.deloitte.com/about for a detailed description of the legal structure of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and its member firms.

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