Building Trust Through Quality

The past 18 months have reinforced for us just how vital the forward-thinking aspects of our strategy—including our investments in technology, upskilling our people, and reimagining our audit—are to the continued success of our people and our firm. As we continue these efforts, we’re making several changes to simplify, move faster and organize ourselves even more around serving our clients. But one thing that is not changing is our focus on quality, and that’s just one of the reasons I’m so proud to unveil our 2021 Audit Quality Report .?

The Importance of Quality?

Over the past year, we’ve continued to focus on delivering quality and meeting the needs of our clients and stakeholders. And this constant focus on audit quality and independence is critical for building trust and confidence in our capital markets by helping to provide confidence that there’s high-quality, reliable information to allow stakeholders to make better decisions.

The quality of our work has a direct tie to the success of our firm, which is why it’s incredibly important that we remain consistent in our audit quality objectives, and recognize the larger role that audits play in the financial reporting ecosystem. It’s clear that our investments in quality have had a positive impact on the results of the 2020 PCAOB inspection —with only one engagement of the 58 inspected to be included in Part 1.A. This is a reflection of how we’ve stayed the course on important initiatives like risk assessment and testing review controls, in addition to several other efforts.

Part of our focus on quality also includes human-led and tech-powered audits . We continually innovate to discover how technology can help solve complex business challenges, build trust and identify new opportunities—not only for ourselves, but for our clients and communities. And the investments we’ve made in technology and upskilling our people have led to the development of our comprehensive audit platform, Tomorrow’s Audit, Today , that delivers enhanced audit quality, more consistent execution, and improved issue identification and communication.?

For example, Aura , the PwC Network’s cloud-based global audit platform, helps deliver audits tailored to our clients’ business by enabling sequential and intuitive audit plan development and risk assessment through each phase of the audit, including leveraging industry-specific content that drives consistency in execution. In addition, our teams utilize automated data extraction tools and data visualization, analytics and auditing tools to enhance risk assessment and consistency and support overall audit quality.?

We are also committed to continuing to identify opportunities for enhancement. Our investments in audit quality, such as delivering tech-enabled audits that reveal deeper insights, have contributed to improvements, but our journey will never be complete.?

The Impact of Our Work

As a purpose-led and values-driven organization, we’re focused on living our values, acting with integrity and maintaining independence as a foundation for building trust. Markets operate most efficiently when there’s reliable, quality information that stakeholders, such as investors, employees, suppliers, regulators and others, can use to make decisions. This includes focusing on financial and non-financial information. After all, market participants are entitled to the same quality of non-financial information as they currently expect from financial disclosures.?

That’s why we’ve increased our efforts and contributions in areas such as XBRL and ESG reporting. In fact, we recently submitted a public comment letter to the SEC regarding recommendations for climate change disclosures. We believe the SEC should coordinate with international bodies to develop global standards for climate change disclosures—and any new requirements should be subject to independent third-party assurance. In addition, we’ve also worked with the SASB to create a digital SASB XBRL taxonomy.?

Supporting Our People

It’s no secret: our people are the driving force behind our journey. And our people are the reason I am so proud of the excellence in our work that we all achieve together. We’re focused on reimagining our peoples’ experiences by creating a culture of care and belonging, supporting our people every day to learn and grow, and enhancing our culture through emphasis on flexibility, well-being and connectivity.?

To us, a culture of belonging is about moving from awareness to empathy and demonstrating inclusive leadership across all levels. One way we do this is by supporting our diverse workforce, and by making sure all of our people have equitable experiences and opportunities to thrive. This means taking intentional actions that focus on networking, performance development, mentorship, sponsorship and training for our women, Black, and Latinx employees. Specifically, we launched a new Access Your Potential commitment to digitally upskill 25,000 Black and Latinx college students, and we aspire to hire 10,000 of these students in the next five years.?

In addition, we’re focused on our strategy for sustainable change, including evolving the experience of our racially/ethnically diverse colleagues in the first two years and shifting the makeup of our partnership, which requires a deliberate cultivation of our pipeline and intentionality in progression.?

We know that diversity is good for business and that inclusive teams lead to different perspectives, creative thinking and open collaboration. These efforts make us more relevant, more sustainable and more impactful for our people, clients and communities.?

Moving Forward

Quality will continue to be our number one priority, as well as excellence in the work that we do. We’ll continue to focus on living our values and maintaining our independence. As an auditor, I believe our role is noble and vitally important for the health of our markets and our economy, and, in a certain respect, the well-being of our society. Certified Public Accountants have a responsibility to help protect the public interest and to provide reasonable assurance over financial information—and in some cases nonfinancial information—that allows investors, consumers and other stakeholders to make better decisions—and it’s a responsibility my colleagues and I take seriously. As we move forward and embark on our new global strategy, I’m excited and hopeful about what is to come.