Auditor calls for international standards

News Article - 23 August 2006
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Clearer global standards must be agreed in the future for corporate governance and financial reporting, an accounting expert has argued.

Martin Ross, senior audit partner for KPMG in Scotland, said that greater co-operation would lead to less duplication of accounting investigations.

Writing in Scottish newspaper the Herald, he said that cross-border compatibility should be a central goal to the auditing industry.

Agreement on multilateral regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the EU's eighth company law directive, is needed to provide this framework.

"It would be a pity if the effectiveness of these efforts to improve corporate governance and the integrity of financial reporting was undermined by a spaghetti junction of overlapping regimes for monitoring the work of auditors," he said.

"What is really needed is the co-operation of all major audit oversight bodies around the world so that home regulators can work to one agreed set of standards for oversight, inspection and investigation and firms will be confident that compliance with standards in one major jurisdiction will ensure compliance elsewhere."

Currently, firms are often subject to multiple inspections from different oversight bodies, each with its own standard.

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