Our report highlights our commitment to audit quality, continued investment in technology and transformation of our audits.
We’re pleased to present our annual report demonstrating our commitment to continuously improving the quality of our audits and strengthening our system of quality control.
This commitment is foundational to our purpose of building a better working world. It’s also central to our responsibility as independent auditors to perform high-quality audits that promote trust and confidence in the capital markets.
As part of our commitment to serving the public interest, we have a responsibility to provide our stakeholders with a better understanding of how we conduct our audits, how we monitor our performance and what we are doing to continuously improve the quality of our audits. This annual report, which we have been producing since 2013, is one way we provide that transparency.
Our report highlights our continued investment in technology that is transforming our audits and enabling our people to spend more time focusing on the key risks in an audit. Stakeholders expect us to deploy the latest technology to better understand and respond to the risks they face. That’s why EY teams are leveraging emerging technologies, including blockchain, artificial intelligence and more, as part of the connected, data-driven audit. This report also describes our investments in attracting, retaining and developing highly skilled professionals who share our values.
We have made significant progress over the past year enhancing audit quality by transforming our audits to be truly digital. Our audit teams are using data analyzers in more areas of our audits and obtaining a better understanding of a company’s processes and the most important risks in the audit, which improves the audit experience for our people and the companies we audit.
We also continue to add capabilities to our audit platform to help our teams better manage their day-to-day audit tasks, communicate securely with the companies we audit and supervise the work of members of the EY global organization when they participate in our audits of multinational companies.
Our culture of doing the right thing and speaking up is critical to our ability to perform high-quality audits. That’s why our leaders continue to emphasize acting with integrity, high ethical standards and independence, along with reinforcing the other specific behaviours that contribute to audit quality. We continue to promote diversity and inclusiveness because teams with diverse perspectives help us conduct higher-quality audits. We are also hiring more auditors with technology skills to help us continue to transform the way we work.
In this year’s report, we discuss in more detail the benefits of the EY global organization, which is committed to conducting globally consistent, high-quality audits. This structure promotes audit quality because the global organization sets a unified tone and facilitates large-scale investments in technology, methodology and training that would be difficult for any member firm to achieve on its own. Our model of having professionals in disciplines such as information technology (IT), tax and valuation, which are global in reach, is also critical to our ability to perform high-quality audits of increasingly complex businesses.
One constant in today’s Transformative Age is the need for trust and confidence in financial reporting. We hope this report provides you with a better understanding of our commitment to delivering high-quality audits to help meet those needs. We welcome any comments and questions you may have about the matters discussed in this report. Please contact an EY Canada partner for more information.
Download our annual report here.
