Audit committees increasingly are expected to take measures to assure they are getting a quality audit of financial statements, but no one has yet defined what constitutes a quality audit.
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board took a crack at it with a research project that led to a concept release in 2015. The idea was not to produce a grade card, per se. In the absence of concrete data that can be tied to audit quality, the board was looking for a way to stimulate discussion on what kinds of data would be useful.
