IOSCO believes that an audit firm transparency report could be considered of high quality if the information in the report includes, among other matters, reporting on the following elements: the audit firm´s legal and governance structure, its measures to foster audit quality, its internal indicators of audit quality and indicators of audit quality as generated by the work of external bodies.

IOSCO believes that an audit firm transparency report should provide information that is:

• clear, useful and presented in sufficient detail to be meaningful to the different groups of likely users of the report;
• fact-based and not potentially misleading;
• unbiased and not oriented toward marketing or selling services;
• concise, specific to the firm and avoids the use of boilerplate language;
• timely, accurate and complete;
• balanced in communicating the audit firm’s output measures of audit quality in addition to any input measures; and
• sufficient in terms of explaining the limitations of the indicators of audit quality, including that the indicators may not be comparable across audit firms.

Review the press release and the report on the IOSCO's Web site.