Abstract This article discusses the procedure adopted by assurance services to assess the market potential. People need perspective on what is a new departure and what is not. They cannot know where they are going without a fix on where they are. So the focus is on the degree to which assurance services are a new departure and on the degree to which they are rooted in the past. The work of the AICPA Special Committee on Assurance Services ("the Committee") task was to assess the economics of auditing and its likely future and to see what new services it made sense to add. This led to defining new assurance services, but how the committee got there says something about the continuity between the two service types. The Committee examined changing conditions affecting the marketplace and studied users' decision-making needs to identify new services, and it developed a definition of assurance services that builds on the audit tradition. It's easy to see the economic bridge between new assurance services based on future conditions and the financial statement audit.
Robert Elliott (Wed,) studied this question.