ISAE 3000 was developed by the International Auditing and Assurance Standard Board (IAASB) and contains requirements and application and other explanatory material specific to reasonable and limited assurance attestation engagements, other than audits or reviews of historical financial information.

The FRC is proposing that compliance with ISAE (UK) 3000 will be mandatory only for such types of engagement the FRC specifies. These will ordinarily be particular engagements for which there is a requirement in law or regulation for an assurance report to be provided by an auditor or other assurance practitioner, or where a clear need has been identified to serve the public interest. Voluntary application to other assurance engagements will be permitted unless a subject matter specific standard relevant to the engagement has been issued by the FRC, in which circumstances that subject matter specific standard is required to be complied with.

A small number of edits to the international standard are proposed to reflect that in the UK assurance practitioners are subject to the FRC's Ethical Standard and the ethical pronouncements of their professional body, and that the FRC is not adopting the other, subject matter specific, ISAEs issued by the IAASB. Text related to the International Code of Ethics that remains relevant is being updated to take account of the conforming changes that the IAASB consulted on in 2019. No edits are proposed that would result in non-compliance with the IAASB's requirements in ISAE 3000.

Comments are requested until 22 May 2020.

A press release and the exposure draft can be found on the FRC website here.