La révision de la norme ISA 315 (2019) : quel impact pour la mission d'audit ?

Abstract

In today’s economy, it is crucial for economic actors to understand the risks that surround the company. Risk analysis is a key process in the audit engagement. As defined in ISA 315, the auditor is required to understand the entity, its environment and its internal control in order to identify and assess all risks of material misstatements in the financial statements. The risks of material misstatements, thus identified, enable the auditor to develop audit procedures to address those risks. Audit missions adopt a risk-based approach to provide effectiveness and efficiency in the procedures. Indeed, the risk analysis process provides a qualitative and quantitative assessment of risk, which determines which audit works must be done, and which could be omitted. In other words, risk assessment allows to get a “maximum impact with minimum effort” (Joyce, n.d.). However, according to a Post-Implementation review, the IAASB regularly identifies some weaknesses in the audit files. Especially concerning the documentation of Internal Control, IT environment, Risk analysis, etc. The IAASB has carried out a complete revision of the ISA 315, with the aim of improving and restructuring the whole standard. The revision’s main objective is to improve and enhance the risk analysis process, and strengthen the critical thinking of auditors. The standard has undergone a significant number of changes from restructuring to the addition of new concepts and definitions. Worries have been raised about the possible impact on the Audit mission. The first result of the interviews indicates that the new concepts integrated were already used in practice. In fact, the major change of the ISA 315 is rather at the documentation level. The revision has strengthened the documentation requirements to oblige auditors to justify their thought process in the audit files. For this reason, the regulation and complexity of the market seem to influence the impacts of the revision. Audit firms in regulated markets do not seem to be impacted by the revision, as they are already subject to heavy regulation on documentation. Audit firms in non-regulated markets, on the other hand, appear to be impacted by the revision, as the new standard brings more stringent documentation requirements.