IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijecac/v9y2020i4p374-396.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Key audit matters and their implications for the audit environment

Author

Listed:
  • Vida Botes
  • Mary Low
  • Aleena Sutton

Abstract

This paper sets out to investigate how the new auditing standard ISA 701: key audit matters addresses issues historically presented by audit reports. The extensive literature around audit reporting highlights that past reforms resulted in a lack of success and the continued existence of the audit expectation gap. Increased auditor liability is one of the major concerns raised by practitioners with the new standard expanding the audit report to include key audit matters. Through a qualitative content analysis examination of the most recent audit reports of the top 100 listed companies on the NZX, ASX and FTSE, key audit matters were identified. The results of the study found that goodwill and intangibles, revenue recognition and taxation were the most common key audit matters. Overall, the results of these findings suggest that these key audit matters may go a long way to addressing the audit expectation gap and issues presented by audit reports.

Suggested Citation

  • Vida Botes & Mary Low & Aleena Sutton, 2020. "Key audit matters and their implications for the audit environment," International Journal of Economics and Accounting, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 9(4), pages 374-396.
    • Handle: RePEc:ids:ijecac:v:9:y:2020:i:4:p:374-396
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=110164
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nicolás Gambetta & Laura Sierra‐García & María Antonia García‐Benau & Josefina Novejarque‐Civera, 2023. "The Informative Value of Key Audit Matters in the Audit Report: Understanding the Impact of the Audit Firm and KAM Type," Australian Accounting Review, CPA Australia, vol. 33(2), pages 114-134, June.
    2. Lioara-Veronica Pasc & Camelia-Daniela Hategan, 2023. "Disclosure of Key Audit Matters: European Listed Companies’ Evidence on Related Parties Transactions," IJFS, MDPI, vol. 11(3), pages 1-12, June.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:ijecac:v:9:y:2020:i:4:p:374-396. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=357 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.