SUMMATIVE ASSIGNMENT
Context
COMPANY ALLOCATION : TUI
| The Financial Reporting Council (FRC) investigated the $5bn (£3.6bn) Autonomy accounting scandal. The audit watchdog alleged that Deloitte failed to properly audit the UK software company.
The complaints were against Deloitte (the firm) and two of its senior partners, Knights and Mercer, along with former Autonomy CFO Sushovan Hussain and former VP of finance Stephen Chamberlain. On the first day of the tribunal the FRC claimed that Deloitte was “reckless”; that Knights had “consciously lost his objectivity” and become too close to the Autonomy director. The FRC also alleged that Knights had shown a “fundamental lack of professional scepticism” and accused him of failing to question Autonomy’s accounts. “It is our case that Deloitte’s work fell clearly and seriously below the standards to be expected from it,” the FRC said. Knights started to “act and think as if he was himself an advocate for Autonomy. He lost his grip on his role as an impartial third-party auditor.” https://economia.icaew.com/news/october-2019/frc-says-deloitte-auditors-too-close-to-autonomy accessed 1/10/19 |
Scenario:
You are a new audit manager in your professional practice. You recently attended a briefing from the Ethics Partner where the comments of the FRC about the Deloitte audit of Autonomy and others were discussed. Your firm is very aware of the increased scrutiny of audit by the media and the regulators and is aiming to ensure that the initial stage of client review and acceptance is explicitly robust.
As the audit manager for a FTSE client, you are reviewing the validity of your appointment as auditor. To help support the development of your audit team you have decided to summarise your findings in a poster.
The company : Tui
Required:
POSTER
Summarise your review of the validity of your client appointment, showing your findings regarding the KEY issues of BOTH the client’s integrity and issues of professional ethics.
As the review into the reform of the audit market in the UK has continued, highlight ONE suggestion and show how this could affect your audit engagement with this client in the future. Do you believe this will enhance audit quality?
Note: You will be allocated your audit client and each of you will have a different client to review.
Your poster should be A3 (in electronic format) supported by any relevant appendices and references. This can use Powerpoint, Publisher or Word Formats but it should be readily legible (no smaller than 10 font) and designed to enable the reader to easily assimilate the information. You may use relevant design tools and colours etc. to aid in this communication
.
REFLECTIVE STATEMENT 500 words
i) Explore why you chose to discuss the specific audit reform in your poster and
ii) Reflect upon how your research into these issues, your class discussions, your formative discussion and the discussions in the Accounting Forum have informed these views.
Overall word limit:
POSTER ONE PAGE A3 SIZE minimum font size 10
REFLECTIVE STATEMENT 500 words
References: – Referencing is important to give your work credibility and many posters showed links to the professional bodies, big 4 or regulators through highlighting logos etc. In order to really have authority your sources must be evidenced BUT this can pose a challenge in this visual medium. As this is not an academic piece of work it might be tempting to avoid referencing but this means that the work lacks credibility so the better Posters linked into references using suffixes (or numbers) and put the references on a separate sheet which I am happy to accept in your summative submission.
Relevance; – This is the key to success with the Poster – you must make sure that everything you are discussing is relevant to the task being asked of you and you look at all of the tasks in the assignment. You need to develop a framework to show how you have decided whether the client has an integrity issue that will affect your ability to act for them ( as in Sports Direct) or whether you have a professional ethics issue that will affect your ability to act for them ( independence, professional competence etc.) You are being marked on the appropriateness of the framework you show you have developed and the evidence of your research into the company and the audit firm around those issues – you may have no problems with acting as the auditor but you need to show why! The framework will need to be referenced – which auditing standards have you used to develop the key parts of the assessment of client integrity, which parts of the ethical code and auditing standards have you used to develop your assessment of your competence. We talked about it alot in seminar 2 and you applied it in your fomrantive in seminar 4but there might be additional ideas that are relevant to your client or firm that you want to add in. For the assessment of the impact of the new reforms in the CMA report and the Brydon Report on your client relationship – choose ONE idea from the reports and think about how it will affect the future of your audit of this client. It may be that the issue you look at affects the firm as a whole or auditing generally and you can discuss it in these wide terms initially but make sure you think about how it will impact on this audit in the future somewhere in your discussion.
Synthesis: – Remember you are being asked to explore whether you should act as the auditor for this company in the next audit – you must make that decision very clear
Analysis: – You need to show the analysis framework clearly around how you have assessed whether you are professionally able to continue with the audit relationship and does the client exhibit sufficent integrity not to pose a reputation risk to your firm or an unacceptabily high audit risk to the firm. You also need to describe in some detail the idea from the report that you considering ( linked back to references from the report) and then you need to evaluate its impact on your audit relationship going forward – here I would have a look at some of the supporting evidence from academic or professional sources about why this idea might work and why it might not to evaluate its impact.
Tone: – Remember you are writing for a professional audience and some of your sources may be from the media and therefore the language may not be entirely appropriate – only use measured and accurate turns of phrase that you can defend!
SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS
Your completed assignment must be uploaded to DUO
no later than 12:00 midday on 30 April 2020.
A penalty will be applied for work uploaded after 12:00 midday as detailed in the Programme Handbook. You must leave sufficient time to fully complete the upload process before the deadline and check that you have received a receipt. At peak periods, it can take up to 30 minutes for a receipt to be generated.
Assignments should be typed, using 1.5 spacing and an easy-to-read 12-point font. Assignments and dissertations/business projects must not exceed the word count indicated in the module handbook/assessment brief.
The word count should:
- Include all the text, including title, preface, introduction, in-text citations, quotations, footnotes and any other items not specifically excluded below.
- Exclude diagrams, tables (including tables/lists of contents and figures), equations, executive summary/abstract, acknowledgements, declaration, bibliography/list of references and appendices. However, it is not appropriate to use diagrams or tables merely as a way of circumventing the word limit. If a student uses a table or figure as a means of presenting his/her own words, then this is included in the word count.
Examiners will stop reading once the word limit has been reached, and work beyond this point will not be assessed. Checks of word counts will be carried out on submitted work, including any assignments or dissertations/business projects that appear to be clearly over-length. Checks may take place manually and/or with the aid of the word count provided via an electronic submission. Where a student has intentionally misrepresented their word count, the School may treat this as an offence under Section IV of the General Regulations of the University. Extreme cases may be viewed as dishonest practice under Section IV, 5 (a) (x) of the General Regulations.
Very occasionally it may be appropriate to present, in an appendix, material which does not properly belong in the main body of the assessment but which some students wish to provide for the sake of completeness. Any appendices will not have a role in the assessment – examiners are under no obligation to read appendices and they do not form part of the word count. Material that students wish to be assessed should always be included in the main body of the text.
Guidance on referencing can be found in the programme handbook and on DUO.
MARKING GUIDELINES
Performance in the summative assessment for this module is judged against the following criteria:
- Relevance to question(s)
- Organisation, structure and presentation
- Depth of understanding
- Analysis and discussion
- Use of sources and referencing
- Overall conclusions
PLAGIARISM AND COLLUSION
Students suspected of plagiarism, either of published work or the work of other students, or of collusion will be dealt with according to School and University guidelines.
END OF ASSESSMENT
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