Three accounting groups—two in the United States and one abroad—plan to study what the market believes an auditor’s report should say, as a preliminary step in potentially revising how the report should be written.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the American Accounting Association, and the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board want to research the “expectation gap” that they already sense exists between what an auditor’s report is supposed to communicate and what readers take away from it, says Charles Landes, vice president for professional standards and services at the AICPA.
