Since No­vem­ber 2011, the Com­pe­ti­tion Com­mis­sion has been look­ing in-depth at 'the­o­ries of harm' which re­late to con­cerns about 'sub-op­ti­mal' au­dit qual­i­ty and lev­els of in­no­va­tion, as well as high­er prices and costs for au­dit ser­vices and the im­pact of less com­pe­ti­tion in non-au­dit­ing mar­kets.

Sue Al­mond, tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor at AC­CA, said: "The whole point of this in­ves­ti­ga­tion has been about the au­dit mar­ket's struc­ture. While the au­dit mar­ket is sta­t­ic, it must be re­mem­bered that au­di­tors act as so­ci­ety's eyes and ears to re­port fraud, bribery and mon­ey laun­der­ing ac­tiv­i­ties."They al­so as­sist the as­sess­ment and col­lec­tion of both di­rect and in­di­rect tax­a­tion, so the fu­ture of au­dit ser­vices need to be as­sured and sup­port­ed."

Al­mond said: "For AC­CA, the is­sue has al­ways been about the end user of au­dit ser­vices, and we have pre­vi­ous­ly said that fu­ture rec­om­men­da­tions need to be work­able for busi­ness while en­hanc­ing in­vestor con­fi­dence."Au­dit is on­ly one part of this jig­saw and it is not the on­ly way to tack­le in­vestor con­cerns. Progress could be made with­out cre­at­ing more rules by en­hanc­ing cor­po­rate re­port­ing through in­te­grat­ed re­port­ing. This de­vel­op­ment aims to re­flect the in­ter­con­nect­ed na­ture of eco­nom­ic and fi­nan­cial per­for­mance with en­vi­ron­men­tal, so­cial and gov­er­nance fac­tors in or­gan­i­sa­tions' an­nu­al re­port­ing.

"We want to see au­dit ser­vices which are well struc­tured, which are trust­ed and which al­so bring the most val­ue to busi­ness and the end-user. These find­ings will no doubt be read with con­sid­er­able in­ter­est not on­ly in the UK but across Eu­rope and the rest of the world, where the fu­ture of au­dit is al­so un­der con­sid­er­able scruti­ny." The Caribbean of­fice of AC­CA will host three au­dit round­ta­bles to dis­cuss these and oth­er crit­i­cal is­sues sur­round­ing the state and rel­e­vance of the au­dit.

Au­dit and In­tegri­ty: max­imis­ing stake­hold­er val­ue will be held in T&T on April 15, Bar­ba­dos on April 17 and Ja­maica on April 19 and will fea­ture pre­sen­ta­tions from AC­CA deputy pres­i­dent Mar­tin Turn­er, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of top ac­count­ing firms, busi­ness lead­ers, reg­u­la­tors and in­vestors as well as a pan­el dis­cus­sion with the Big 4 au­dit firms.