How our investments, people and strategy support our tireless pursuit of audit quality

This article is co-authored by Kathryn Kaminsky, Vice Chair - US Trust Solutions Co-Leader & Wes Bricker, Vice Chair - US Trust Solutions Co-Leader

As auditors, our work plays an important role in helping to build trust in the capital markets. Trust is earned by saying what we will do, sharing why, delivering on those commitments and being transparent in our reporting. That’s why we release our Audit Quality Report each year, highlighting timely, meaningful information about the actions we have taken—and continue to take—in support of our commitment to perform quality audits.?

It’s clear that our investments in our people and technology and our never-ending dedication to quality positively impact our work. While there are many contributing factors and various audit quality indicators, we’re particularly proud that our 2020 PCAOB inspection results—on 2019 audits—had only one engagement of the 52 that were subject to inspection included in Part 1A, and we expect a similar level of quality represented in our upcoming 2021 PCAOB inspection results. Further, 99.7% of our issuer audit client financial statements were not restated in the past fiscal year. These are exceptional results—and that’s what we continue to strive for with our clients and teams and for the benefit of stakeholders.?

We are committed to quality because we know it matters. This past fiscal year, we audited more than 700 SEC registrants representing more than $11 trillion in market capitalization—including 27% of Fortune 500 companies—and nearly two-thirds of mutual funds and over three-quarters of exchange-traded funds, based on assets under management. Our profession is deeply relevant, and the quality of our work is impactful throughout the capital markets. That’s why we’re so proud of our quality journey, what we’ve been able to achieve, and what we hope to achieve in the future. This is a testament to our strategy, investments and people—and our commitment to continuous improvement.

Our human-led, tech-powered approach

To continue enhancing our audit services, we are strengthening our enterprise technology. It’s part of a larger effort to focus on making our firm more effective and efficient so we can spend time where it matters most—working with our clients and investing in our people. Our goal is to equip our teams with the best tools and technologies to help enable this.?

Specifically, we are investing $1 billion globally into the next generation of the audit to deliver a new audit quality ecosystem. Exploring and investing in new technologies and revisiting underlying audit methodologies allows us to standardize, simplify and automate our audit work and, most importantly, provides opportunities to sustain and further enhance our audit quality.?

We do this through a human-led and tech-powered approach that allows our people to develop and leverage new tools that can help improve how we conduct our audit work and the experience of our people. By bringing together the best of our people and our technology, we can automate repetitive tasks and allow our people to focus on higher risk, more judgmental areas of the audit.?

Our people

Of course, we would not be where we are today without our people. Through the power of our people, we bring our strategy to life and help our clients as they seek to build trust and deliver sustained outcomes. Earlier this year, we launched My+, our reimagined people experience that’s grounded in flexibility and choice to allow our people the opportunity to personalize their careers—all tailor-made to support their development, well-being, sense of purpose and aspirations.?

We would not be able to provide excellent service, develop new tools and technology, or deliver quality work for our clients and their stakeholders without the hard work and dedication of all our team members. They are the driving force behind our firm, and we believe prioritizing our people and their needs allows them to best serve our clients and deliver quality work.?

Our multidisciplinary model?

Our multidisciplinary model—previously and especially now under The New Equation—provides the framework that further enhances the quality of our work and our client service. By combining assurance, tax compliance and reporting lines of service, we’ve created the largest trust platform in the world. All of these services provide valuable information to clients and our stakeholders that contribute to trust in the capital markets. And quality is the bedrock of building trust. Understanding these expectations, acting with integrity, and maintaining independence form the foundation upon which we earn that trust.?

Throughout our Trust Solutions and Consulting Solutions practices, we have many specialists with unique skill sets and experiences, which benefits our firm, our clients and our people. For our people, it opens up opportunities for upskilling, exposure to new business areas, and additional career pathways. For our firm and our clients, this helps create a workforce with diversity of thought and experience, and it allows us to leverage experts from across the business to provide specialized services to solve increasingly complex problems.??

Perhaps most importantly, we see the need for a wider set of expertise to deliver on the future of audit, including providing a level of? assurance on the issues that matter to investors and other stakeholders in the markets, like climate, cyber and XBRL. All of those areas—and many others—go beyond the present scope of the financial statement audit and require additional expertise and broader understanding of the business model. Our multidisciplinary approach provides an understanding of both the business and stakeholder needs in the market, which is helpful to delivering in-demand assurance services. In the end, all of these factors support our commitment to audit quality—it makes us better.?

We are proud of the value our firm and our people create by performing quality audit work. One thing will always be true: We are committed to delivering quality and doing the right thing—day in and day out—and we will never waver on that commitment.?