FAR’s 2nd Annual Report

We are happy to present FAR’s 2nd annual report for the financial year from 1 January 2017 till 31 December 2017. We are proud to show that good progress has been made in opening the “black box” of auditing – and thereby for innovative research through cooperation between academics and audit practitioners.

In 2016 we laid the fundament for the Foundation for Auditing Research: the research, data, and legal infrastructure. 2017 was needed to find out how the structured and reliable gathering of research data works best in practice and how much it actually involves. Thanks to the enormous efforts made by the affiliated audit firms in unlocking data, as well as the considerable patience exercised by the research teams, we are reaching the tipping point of the learning curve of actual delivery of research data – based on which we expect to be able to share our first research results in the near future. We have already been able to share intermediate findings at our 2018 international FAR conference on 5 and 6 June 2018. This demonstrates that the auditing profession is serious in its endeavors to obtain academic insights to help strengthen the continuous improvement of the profession as a whole.

We are excited about the foundations that have been laid and the learning curve we are in to make further major steps in the coming period towards academic research into the drivers of audit quality.