Alix Stuart is a senior writer at CFO.

To see what auditors in our survey had to say about CFOs, click here.

Is Audit Quality Improving?

The Center for Audit Quality, a new industry group for accounting firms that perform public-company audits, says that audit quality has improved over the past several years, according to its recent survey of audit-committee members. More than 80 percent thought audits were better today than five years ago. The auditors themselves seem somewhat less confident, according to a CFO survey. Just over half — 54 percent — said they are more likely to detect fraud today compared with five years ago, while only 4 percent said they were less likely to find fraud.

"There are things we do today that we rarely did five years ago," says Robert Kueppers, deputy CEO at Deloitte. One, he says, is to bring in forensic accountants "to try to figure out, if someone wanted to fiddle around with the books, where they would do that." The new focus on internal controls has helped, too. "If your controls are good, it's just that much harder to circumvent them," Kueppers says.

CFOs, however, seem to be more skeptical. In a separate CFO survey (click here), only 23 percent of finance chiefs said they thought auditors were more likely today to detect a fraud, and 11 percent thought they were less likely to do so. — A.S.

• « previous
• 1
• 2
• 3