Abstract The article examines the prospects of assurance services and its implications for the academic community. The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants Special Committee on Assurance Services was set up in response to a decline in the market vitality of the audit. The current audit is surely very valuable to the capital markets and to the economy, but it is a mature product that has not been growing. The audit service is generalized rather than tailored to the individual needs of investors and creditors and other users, yet responding to individual customer needs is one of the great messages of the last decade of economic change. The Committee's primary method for identifying potential services, however, has been much more inductive. It has been based on researching customer needs. The Committee is customer-oriented in the sense of seeking their needs and trying to identify what they would be willing to purchase because they think it can help them fulfill their objectives.
Robert Elliott (Fri,) studied this question.