Statement

Sir Donald Brydon in his 2019 report on the quality and effectiveness of audit set out the following as the Principles of Corporate Auditing.

Auditors act with integrity, fulfilling their responsibilities with honesty, fairness, candour, courage and confidentiality;

Auditors are appropriately qualified and exercise professional judgment and appropriate scepticism or suspicion throughout their work;

Auditors act in the public interest and have regard to the interests of the users of their report beyond solely those of shareholders;

Auditors maintain independence from the entity and its officers on whom they are engaged to report;

Auditors are objective and provide findings and opinions unaffected by bias, prejudice, compromise and personal or corporate conflicts of interest;

Auditors work to verify and encourage openness and honesty in financial and other company reporting;

Auditors ask the directors to report any material information that may legitimately be disclosed to assist the understanding of users of an audit report, and, if necessary, disclose it themselves;

Auditors provide appropriate challenge to management, assessing critically information and explanations received for signs of over-optimism, judgmental bias or possible fraud;

Auditors reports contain clear findings and expressions of opinion setting out all information necessary for a proper understanding of the opinion and its basis; and

Auditors reports give transparency to any differences of view with management and how they were resolved.

You are required:

.To take any six of the principles identified by Sir Donald and explain with reasons whether you agree or disagree they are a fundamental principle of corporate auditing ie the audits of statutory accounts of UK companies. You should also explain how you think the principles you have selected will be achieved in practice and what barriers there may be in preventing such achievement. (95 marks)

Your response should be about 1800 words long.