AUDIT COMMITTEE AND AUDITOR OVERSIGHT UPDATE

The Center for Audit Quality (CAQ) and Ideagen Audit Analytics (IAA) have released the Audit Committee Transparency Barometer 2025  ( Barometer 2025 ), the twelfth edition of the CAQ’s annual analysis of audit committee disclosures. The press release  announcing Barometer 2025  reports that “while skills matrix disclosure continues at high rates and disclosure of cybersecurity expertise on boards has grown, most disclosure areas have stagnated or declined.”  Key findings of

During fiscal year 2025, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought 30 percent fewer cases against public companies and their subsidiaries than in FY 2024, and 93 percent of the 2025 cases were brought before January 25, 2025 – the day on which Biden Administration SEC Chair Gensler resigned.  Those findings are reported in SEC Enforcement Activity: Public Companies and Subsidiaries—Fiscal Year 2025 Update , the annual report of Cornerstone Research and the New York Unive

Ideagen Audit Analytics (IAA) has released Critical Audit Matters: A five-Year Review 2020-2024 , a study of critical audit matters (CAMs) that appeared in audit reports filed by SEC-registered companies between 2020 and 2024. IAA finds that in both FY 2023 and FY 2024, 68 percent of auditor reports contained at least one CAM, up from 62 percent in 2020, the first year of CAM reporting. However, for audit opinions that contained a CAM, the average number of CAMs per opinion h

Auditors frequently face client incivility -- “low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target” – and, when they do, they are less likely to challenge aggressive financial reporting.  There are, however, coping strategies that may reduce the adverse effects of client incivility on the auditor’s judgment. These are some of the findings of The Influence of Client Incivility and Coping Strategies on Audit Professionals’ Judgments , a survey and experiment