Creating our own future – A call to action

Those of you who have been reading previous blogs issued on #AuditorProud Day know that my messages have always been very upbeat. Despite everything we hear about the audit profession, I firmly believe that we have all the tools at our disposal to be successful.

The need for assurance will only increase going forward: Technology, AI, cybersecurity and ESG are just some of the challenges we are faced with today. Auditors have a rightful place in this ecosystem and there is therefore no better time than the present moment to reinforce our position.

So, what is the problem?

From my point of view, the problem is that we hope too much and act too little. We hope for a time when clients perceive our engagements as a value proposition rather than a largely unnecessary cost, when we don’t suffer from staff shortages and when new standards do not consistently come into force exactly at the wrong moment.

The problem is that we make excuses and focus on all these obstacles rather than thinking outside the box to find innovate solutions.  Show me one auditor who has never blamed the expectation gap, tight budgets, or difficult clients for a not so successful engagement.

And the biggest problem of all is that we passively listen to what the world says about us rather than rewriting our own history and creating our own future. All the public hears about on social media, in the press and on television is that there are audit failures, that quality is decreasing, that the profession is unethical. But we all know that saying something over and over doesn't make it any more true. One reason why the public only knows this one narrative is that we do nothing to change it.

Rewrite the script

What if things were different though? What if we started clearly demonstrating to the public that we are the profession that brings trust and reliability of data, both financial and non-financial, to stakeholders. What if we could convince the public that at this very crucial point in history, we have more of a public interest responsibility than most other professions and that we are determined to play our part. What if we helped the world understand that investor focus and public interest focus are not always competing objectives and that we are the profession that can make stakeholders realise that they are often complementary.

Needless to say, playing 'what if' remains nothing but a game unless we translate our hopes and ambitions into goals and actions. I, therefore, want to use this year’s Auditor Proud Day to make a call for action: Let us together turn our many obligations into just as many opportunities, let us collaborate as one united profession to overcome every obstacle in our way and let us create a better future for our firms, our people, our clients and all our stakeholders.

What if we could be here in one year’s time to see that we have managed to change the narrative? Wouldn’t that be worth the effort?