Peer Review: Go Beyond "Pass" To Providing Client Value

Peer reviews can bring major disruptions to nearly every aspect of your audit practice, with further impacts yet to be felt. For audit groups, peer reviews can cause a heightened sense of stress in a time of the year when the teams are either recovering from their last busy season or getting ready for the next one. Regardless of when your next peer review is happening, your firm needs to meet audit standards on every engagement. Is your firm executing audit steps using your methodology, technology, and forms at their highest level to ensure every engagement passes? As a profession, we need to deliver the best on every engagement so that we are not only meeting the current audit standards, but also exceeding our clients’ and their boards’ expectations. 

Audit teams are tasked with helping clients succeed and maintaining the confidence of the users of their financial statements while performing both effective and efficient audits. This is especially true for those working on audits of small companies, who are facing some large challenges in 2020. Audit partners are facing similar challenges in staying on top of the audit standards and assuring their teams are performing audits that will pass their next peer review.

Every year, the Enhancing Audit Quality (EAQ) Initiative releases areas of focus for upcoming peer reviews. Most of these areas of focus are carried over from previous years as the audit profession continues to struggle with certain areas and procedures that are performed on nearly every audit. For 2020, these areas are risk assessment, internal controls, auditing revenue recognition, engagement acceptance and continuance, and SOC engagements.

Ask yourself these questions as it relates to risk assessment…Are your teams identifying significant risks? Properly documenting inherent risk assessments and risks of material misstatements? Linking those risks to your audit procedures?

If you answered “No” to any of these, not only could a rating of “Pass” on your next peer review be in jeopardy, but it may also mean that your teams are missing audit procedures or performing unnecessary procedures.

Failing your peer review not only damages the reputation of your firm, but also causes your firm to incur costs on re-audits and corrective actions (e.g. remediation CPE courses, post-issuance reviews by another CPA). These are consequences from poor auditing that your firm just cannot afford.

Thomson Reuters has partnered with esteemed leaders in the profession to host a one-hour CPE webcast designed to provide you with insights into peer reviews of audit engagements, including how to utilize Thomson Reuters cloud-based audit software to facilitate compliance with standards, and provide best practices in auditing to help you achieve a “Pass” rating on your next peer review.

Register now and learn from the experts on how your firm can survive its next peer review and come out thriving on your upcoming audit engagements.