Audit Quality Indicators: A Status Update on Possible Public Disclosures and Insights from Audit Practice

SUMMARY: This paper addresses the current status of the recommendation by the Advisory Committee on the Auditing Profession (ACAP) that auditing firms provide periodic reporting on audit quality indicators. We first consider several reasons why public reporting of audit quality indicators in the U.S. is highly controversial. We then report some information on how global network auditing firms are internally measuring audit quality in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley environment.