Research On Disclosure Of Key Audit Matters Of Listed Companies In The Financial Industry

As a bridge between listed companies and investors,audit reports have always played an important role in conveying information to the outside world,but in addition to audit opinions,audit reports have all used standardized language and cannot convey more information to investors,which weakens the value of audit reports.The new audit reporting standard requires adding personalized information to audit reports to avoid uniformity,the most emblematic of which is the Chinese Certified Public Accountants Auditing Standard No.1504-Communicating Key Audit Matters in Audit Reports.By disclosing key audit matters,CPAs can remind report users of major financial risks and operational risks of the enterprise.In this way,the reform has alleviated the information asymmetry between listed companies and intended users to some extent,but as the implementation of the new standard has become longer,its drawbacks have gradually surfaced.Compared with developed countries,China’s financial industry started late,the development is relatively lagging,but the momentum is rapid,now the financial market is increasingly large,the financial system is more and more perfect.According to statistics,due to the high risk of the financial industry,since the implementation of the new auditing standards in 2016,the average number of key audit matters disclosed has been much higher than that of other industries.In the Notice on Doing a Good Job in the Audit of the2021 Annual Reports of Listed Companies,the China Notes Association also listed financial-related listed companies as industries requiring special attention due to high audit risks;And once a risk event occurs in the financial industry,it may affect the whole body and affect the development of all walks of life.In this context,this paper focuses on listed companies in the financial industry.Against the background of the promulgation of the new auditing standards in 2016,this paper systematically analyzes the disclosure of key audit matters of A-share listed companies in the financial industry from 2017 to 2021,including the number and types of disclosures,and finds that in the financial industry,financial asset impairment matters are disclosed the most often,the assessment of the scope of consolidation of structured entities accounts for a relatively large proportion,and the key audit matters of different segments of the industry reflect their industry characteristics.Later,the quality of disclosure of key audit matters was analyzed from the perspectives of investors,firms and regulators,and the characteristics and disadvantages of disclosure of key audit matters were summarized.In the case analysis part,a representative listed company is selected from four sub-industries in the financial industry,starting from the three aspects of adequacy,similarity and comprehensibility of key audit matters,and finally it is found that there may still be problems of insufficient disclosure,over-standardization and insufficient comprehensibility of key audit matters due to the lack of necessary professional competence of certified public accountants,cost control in the audit process,inadequate supervision and imperfect reward and punishment system.In order to solve the above problems,this paper puts forward optimization suggestions from the perspectives of certified public accountants,audited entities and regulatory agencies,such as improving the professional competence of certified public accountants,actively cooperating with the work of certified public accountants,and improving the supervision system before,during and after the supervision system by regulatory authorities,hoping to effectively deal with the problems existing in key audit matters,so as to contribute to the realization of the original intention of audit report reform.The innovation of this paper is that although the research focuses on the financial industry and starts from the financial industry as a whole,it also conducts research on the sub-sectors of the financial industry,and provides case studies supplemented by empirical analysis,which can contribute some results to the research in the field of key audit matters and the financial industry.However,this paper also has certain limitations,because the research objects are limited to the financial industry and case companies,and the problems and suggestions summarized may not be widely representative.