Câu hỏi: hãy trình bày về vai trò c

Câu hỏi: hãy trình bày về vai trò của kiểm toán đối với doanh nghiệp và nền kinh tế.
Global Capital Markets and the Global Economy:
A Vision from the CEOs of the International Audit Networks

Audit, now and near future
Public companies prepare and issue financial statements that reflect their performance over some recent period, typically a quarter or a year, and that conform with the accounting standards that apply in their home countries (the subject of which accounting standards apply is increasingly important in a global context and is discussed later in the text). Preparation of the financial statements is management’s responsibility.
The purpose of an auditor is to express an opinion on the financial statements. The nature of that opinion is made clear by the auditing rules set forth by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) in the United States, which are typical of similar rules used in most other countries. In the words of the PCAOB, an “auditor has a responsibility to plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether caused by error or fraud.” (AU Section 110, emphasis added).
The underscored words are important. That auditors are charged with obtaining “reasonable assurance” that the financial statements are free from “material misstatement” means, by definition, that they cannot catch every misstatement — only those that are material and that can be found out through reasonable effort. In essence, auditors must do the best they can, given the fact that they are not running the companies whose accounts they are charged with auditing. Even with these limitations, the importance of audits of public companies is uncontested. Capital markets could not function unless investors have some reasonable idea of the performance and financial position of the companies whose securities they buy and sell.
For example, the European Commission’s Communication on the Statutory Audit in the European Union (Com 98/C 143/03) stated that the requirement to have accounts audited by a qualified professional was designed to protect the public interest.
As markets undergo this rapid process of globalization, the public company audit profession, as the independent eyes and ears for investors and other stakeholders, is uniquely positioned to help ensure stability and efficiency at this time of change. In fulfilling this function, the profession can enable investors to make better, more informed decisions when weighing risks against rewards. By assuring fuller transparency of the financial status of companies, audit networks confer at least three important benefits for the global economy:
• Audits improve the allocation of capital among companies, wherever they are located, facilitating investors’ decisions to channel funds to those enterprises offering the highest risk-adjusted returns.
• Audits help insulate the global financial system against systemic risk. The Asian and subsequent financial crises during 1997-98 amply demonstrated that financial contagions are more likely to spread in the absence of transparency.
• By empowering investors with the right information, audits facilitate good corporate governance,inducing corporate managers of all companies to act in ways that maximize the interest of all their stakeholders.
In short, quality public company audits both serve and work through investors to benefit global capital markets. The globalization of the investment community will become increasingly important as the populations of most developed countries age and sell some of the securities in their retirement portfolios (or their pension funds do the same), often if not primarily to investors in the developing world. Similarly, firms in the developing world will want to continue accessing developed country investors, in order to finance their expansion. Wherever they are located, investors will make the best decisions if the companies whose securities are offered for sale consistently provide reliable and useful information.
Given our independence and experience, we are in an ideal position to provide value to investors throughout the world. And by helping facilitate the stability and strength of capital markets, our networks can help stimulate economic growth as well, which recent economic research has linked to the development of capital markets.
We can do all this, however, only if the rules by which public companies report and which govern our audits are global, if the regulators who oversee us become more formally coordinated, and if we continue to improve the consistency of audits across the different countries in which our networks operate.
Ultimately, what investors and other stakeholders of public companies want and need is information that is relevant, reliable, timely, simply presented and comparable across jurisdictions so that all stakeholders have a way not only of accurately measuring past performance, but more importantly, making the best possible projections of future company performance. In a global setting, this objective can be attained only if earnings, cash flow or any other item of interest means the same thing in the United States, as it does in Europe, Japan, China, Brazil, Russia, India or any other part of the world (as is already true for many products that public companies now produce and sell throughout the world).
Here we highlight several of the most immediate challenges that confront policy makers at the national and international levels as they seek to ensure the timely dissemination of company information that best serves investors. In the next section, we look out further and envision how continuing demands by investors for relevant information and advances in technology over the longer run will lead to a new company reporting model, and how our profession must adapt so that it can play a constructive role in enabling all company stakeholders to benefit in the changed global economy.

Confront the “Expectations Gap” Regarding Fraud Detection
Perhaps no single issue is the subject of more confusion, yet is more important, than the nature of the obligation of auditors to detect fraud — or intentional material misstatement of financial information by public companies. After all, fraud was at the center of various corporate financial reporting scandals earlier this decade. Allegations of fraud are central in the ongoing lawsuits brought by investors against individuals and companies, as well as against audit networks for alleged failures to uncover them. It is essential that all parties engaged in business reporting — employees, management, directors, auditors and policy makers — put in place appropriate procedures and policies to prevent and detect fraud. Nonetheless, there is a significant “expectations gap” between what various stakeholders believe auditors do or should do in detecting fraud, and what audit networks are actually capable of doing, at the prices that companies or investors are willing to pay for audits.
As summarized in the accompanying box, prevailing audit standards require auditors to conduct audits with a “healthy degree of skepticism,” always recognizing the possibility that fraud could occur. The standards give guidance about what auditors can do to uncover fraud if it exists.
But there are limits to what auditors can reasonably uncover, given the limits inherent in today’s audits. Specifically, unless companies or investors are willing to pay auditors to police all of a company’s transactions, auditors are limited to using indirect means to ascertain whether fraud has occurred. These methods include examinations of accounts and records where the principal aim is to look for anomalies, interviews of company employees and management that are not “under oath,” and reviews of the companies’ “internal controls” over the spending of funds (a specific requirement in the United States under Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, enacted in 2002). These methods clearly are useful, indeed essential, to preventing and discovering fraud. But they are not foolproof, nor can they be expected to be.
Hence, the “expectations gap” arises because many investors, policy makers and the media believe that the auditor’s main function is to detect all fraud, and thus, where it materializes and auditors have failed to find it, the auditors are often presumed to be at fault. Given the inherent limitations of any outside party to discover the presence of fraud, the restrictions governing the methods auditors are allowed to use, and the cost constraints of the audit itself, this presumption is not aligned with the current auditing standards.
What is sorely needed is a constructive dialogue among investors, other company stakeholders, policy makers and our own professionals about what should be done to close or at least narrow the “expectations gap” relating to fraud. Given the globalization of capital markets, it is vital that this conversation include stakeholders in public companies and capital markets throughout the world. We are committed, also, to working with others to develop ways to prevent fraud from occurring.
These conversations must recognize, however, that our profession is committed to continuously improving our abilities and methods to detect fraud. We are doing this through the commitment of resources to support research into new methodologies and technologies that should expand our ability to uncover fraud. At the same time, we believe it is useful to consider additional ideas for enhancing fraud detection, which we briefly outline below. There are arguments for and against each of these concepts, and thus we do not necessarily embrace any one or all of them. But we believe that, collectively, they have sufficient merit that these options ought to be seriously debated by stakeholders and policy makers. We welcome and enc