Audit Practice Guidance No. 1 of 2024

ACRA published the Audit Practice Guidance No. 1 of 2024  (PDF, 330KB), which provides the public accountants (“PAs”) and accounting entities (“AEs”) a guide on performing an effective root cause analysis (“RCA”) and consequently to design the appropriate remediation plan (“RAP”).  

This guidance is issued in view of the introduction of the structured monitoring programme by ACRA focussing on PAs who receive a “Partially satisfactory” or “Not satisfactory” inspection outcome under the Practice Monitoring Programme (“PMP”) and for AEs whose Quality Control Standards (“QC”) reviews led to either a “Partially satisfactory” or “Not satisfactory” outcome. ACRA will be reviewing and assessing the information in the PAs’ and AEs’ RCA and RAP submissions to ascertain robustness and appropriateness of the RCA and RAP respectively. This structured monitoring programme is an approach to prevent and/or reduce the occurrence of recurring PMP inspection or QC review findings. The PAs and AEs should undertake a comprehensive and critical analysis to identify the underlying root causes of the PMP inspection or QC review findings and to formulate an effective remediation plan.

Our past issues of the Audit Practice Bulletins and Guidance are available here.