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企业制度内部审计

你是一个自由职业者，你拥有一些审计客户，这些客户需要你对新的投资项目的建议。你同样对于该公司的情况相当了解，包括它的业务内容，商业策略，人事制度。你也很清楚自己应该怎样建议他们去吸引投资。你是穿好你的职业装带上助手给他建议呢，还是冒着失去客户的风险告诉他要他去向你的业务竞争对手去咨询？

毫不奇怪，大多数的会计师事务所都会选择前者去发展自己的业务，有相当数量的小公司现在都提供商业策略和管理咨询业务。然而，美国保险和交易委员会对审计师的独立性制定的规则使得五大会计师事务所正在疯狂的买卖变更它们公司的顾问业务，而英国的小会计公司正经历相反的情况。

“这段日子我们提供了更多地顾问和咨询方面的业务，”Matthrew Gray这样认为，它是安永的合伙人之一，“相对于审计师来说有时候我们更是一名商业建议者；最近我们开始了IT 业务的咨询。”

随着审计业务限制的免除，越来越多的家族式企业需要咨询服务，包括从开支到电子商务等很多领域。所以事务所不可能在竞争激烈的环境下，只简单的单单从事审计业务。

对安永这样的公司来讲，关键是保证他们业务随着客户的增长而增长，并且提供其客户需要的咨询服务，同时也提供其基本的审计业务。按照从伦敦经济分析学家得来的结论，90%的中小公司对它们的作为感到满意。高达94%的被采访到的中小公司不同意会计公司只能从事审计业务的观点。有76%比例并不认为审计师从事其他业务会对它的独立性产生威胁。

“小的公司对于非审计业务的依赖性更强一些。”Neil lerner解释道，他是毕马威的合伙人之一。“企业业主和企业经营者希望从会计师那里获得一系列的可信的服务。很明显，他们并不认为这样会对审计师的独立性有什么影响。”

“他们并不需要经过激烈的讨论，也不需要花钱去寻找新的合作伙伴。假如会计事务所不能提供全方位的服务，那么其客户的开支将会大大增加。”Lerner 这样认为。

John Harssion 是一个拥有五名会计师的事务所的所有者。他肯定了这个观点，“若干年来，我们开始关注商业咨询业务；我们觉得如果我们的业务不仅仅局限于审计，那么我们会更好地进行商业沟通。”

这家公司已开始就拥有两种业务-一种是审计业务，另一种事顾问/管理咨询业务，但是后者这一直没有实际运行起来。若有两支队伍，分别从事两项业务，那么从事审计业务的一方往往忽视了管理会计方面的业务也要展开，因此对于客户来讲，其支出将会大大增加。现在，将这两种业务合二为一，但同时也有公司还将审计业务和咨询业务保持分立。Harrsion更喜欢能够提供综合服务的会计师。若有人能够精通一项业务的内外事宜，他们将更加有用。他说“关键在于增加其价值，我们工作人员拥有极高的专业素质和道德修养，所以人为的界限是根本不必要的。”

中小会计师事务所联合会的主席Arthur Levitt认为他建议的严格的准则是完全必要的，因为“绝对不能让公众的利益受到任何风险。若严格的遵守这些限制，就意味着这些

事务所将失去一些能够获利的咨询业务，但Levitt认为这对于加强审计师的独立性是完全必要的，尤其是对五大会计师事务所来说。他认为：五大通常将过多的精力用在了扩张其它的业务的行为上。审计权力成了进入更为盈利业务的敲门砖。

Levitt同样建议，在一项下显而易见的命令中，激起美国职业大众对领导组织的不满，小的独立的会计师事务所应当“挺住，并且拿回应属于他们的财物，提供令人满意的私人服务。像世界上最为严厉的客观的独立的会计师一样。

在英国，同在美国一样，小的会计师事务所经常不仅经营审计和档案保管业务，而且经营商业咨询和顾问业务。但作为一名审计师，首要的要求是保持独立性，为了保证这一点，审计师必须遵循既定的条例和规则，还有基本的道德准则。

有一条既定的界限置于咨询和审计之间，Gray承认，“但是那样对于我们来说，并非实际的问题。假如我们认为那会出现利益冲突，我们经常会建议让另外的合作者去做审计业务，因为你必须严格遵守规则，但事实上，这种情况并没有出现。”

Gray认为小的会计师事务所经营情况同五大并不一样，他们所能触及的风险远不及五大；顾客也有完全不同的期望，“我们的大多数客户是家族式企业，依赖我们提供全方位的服务，他们公司本身并没有设置该方面的专家，提供经营建议是我们业务的一部分。”

这种观点得到了伦敦经济研究者的支持，52% 的小公司认为他们的会计师同样是他们的经营建议者，高于银行经理的建议。我们可以提供真正了解公司和其认识的顾问。Harrison认为。

他认为审计初衷的改变会影响小公司的商业机遇，无情的是若一些小公司失去了咨询业务，那么他们将失去生存的动力。

但答案并非是将所有的审计业务都放弃，“目前情况下，将我们同不具备会计师资格的人分开的标准是我们具有审计资格。”“培训和工作经验是非常严格的，它代表着我们很高的地位，将来最大的威胁来自这些非职业会计师，他们能以较低的价格提供服务，因为他们没有进行投资在培训上。但是目前，他们是受到限制的，因为他们只能为公司提供非审计业务。”

Gray 认为离开了咨询工作，许多小规模的审计公司将面临危险。“我们业务增长大部分集中在咨询业务上而非审计业务，因为我们的客户有减少的趋势，审计门槛的改变影响了客户。我们将继续从事审计业务，事实上最近我们还得到了两家新客户，然而实际业务的增长依赖于咨询业务。”

在五大会计师事务所实际上是管理咨询等业务反哺了审计业务和其他业务。许多的小审计师事务所机构依赖咨询业务以求得生存。但更重要的是，企业组织同时也依赖会计师的帮助，希望他们不只作为审计师而存在，同时要扮演财务顾问等方面的角色。

“作为一家小的公司你必须随着时间的推移而作相应的改变，”Gray 这样说。“企业承受了越来越多来自政府的负担，他们承担了大量的文件工作和法律责任要处理。作为会计师，我们要站在高于这个游戏的位置，在我们顾客需要的时候，提供正确的建议。”

外文原文

You are a sole practitioner. You have several audit clients, one of which needs advice on raising money for a new project. You have know the company for years and understand its business, strategy and people. You also know exactly how you would suggest that what the company needs is to talk to your competitor up road, and, risk losing your valued audit client to them?

Unsurprisingly, most accountancy firms have chosen the first option at some point in their development, and a large number of small firms now offer business strategy and management advice. And while the US securities and Exchange Commission regulations on auditor independence have drive the Big Five accountancy firms into a frenzy of buying, selling and quibbling over the names of their consultancy arms, many of the UK’s smaller accountancy firms are doing exactly the opposite.

These days we’re offering much more in the way of consultancy and business advice, agrees Matthew Gray, a partner with Grant&Co, an accountancy firm in Gloucestershire. We’re more business advisers than accountants sometimes; more recently we’ve begun to move into IT consultancy.

With the audit exemption limit rising and more and more family run business needing advice on anything from costing to e-commerce, it is simply not viable to sit firmly on one side of the fence and offer audit and nothing else.

For firms like Grant&Co, it is crucial that they are able to grow with their clients and offer the business advice they need, while also offering the staple audit services their business is built on. And according to research from economic analysts London Economics, nine out of 10 small and medium-sized(SEMs) enterprises are very pleased that they do. A whopping 94% of SEMs surveyed disagreed with the statement that accountancy firms should only be permitted to carry out audit and not offer other services, and 76%did not see that auditor independence would be compromised in any way.

“Small companies rely on their accountancy firms for more than just audit,” explains Neil Lerner, a partner at KPMG. “Busy proprietors and entrepreneurs want to be able to access a range of services from a trusted adviser; they obviously see no conflict between this and the independence role of the auditor. ”

Neither do they want the hassle and expense of searching for a new partner. “There would be a significant increase in costs for smaller companies if they were unable to use one supplier for a range of services,” Lerner admits.

John Harrison, a sole practitioner who has five consultants working for him, confirms this view. “We started focusing on business consulting a few years ago; we felt we would be of better use to the business community if our skills were more wide-ranging than just audit,” he explains. The firm originally had two arms – one audit, and one consultancy/management accounting – but this arrangement did not really work. By having two separate teams doing auditing and consulting work, the audit side would often ignore the work the management accounting arm was doing, and the costs went up for client. The two sides of the business are now one, and while some firms try to ensure that audit and consultancy are kept separate, Harrison prefers to offer clients one constant who will take care of all their needs, whether audit or business advice. “If someone knows a business inside out, they will be much more useful,” he says. “The key is to

add value. Our people have very high professional and ethical standards, which means that Chinese walls are simply not necessary.”

SEC chairman Arthur Levitt holds that the strict guidelines he has suggested are essential, because “nothing less than the public interest is at stake”. The guidelines, if implemented, would mean that many accountancy firms will be forced to give up some of the lucrative consultancy work they offer their clients, but Levitt sees this as a necessary measure to preserve auditors’ independence. The Big Five in particular, he argues, have been ”more concerned with expanding their role so broadly that, all too often, the audit responsibility becomes more of a foot in the door for other, more profitable services”.

Levitt has also suggested, in an apparent bid to stir up the grassroots of the American profession against its leadership, that the smaller independence accounting firms should “stand up and take back what some are trying to take form them; the pride and privilege of serving…as the most rigorous, obvious, objective and independent accountants in the world”.

In the UK, as in the US, smaller accountancy firms are often fully fledged business advisers and consultants as well as auditors and bookkeepers. But as auditors, the overriding requirement is for independence. To ensure this, they must comply with a raft of statutory and regulatory rules, as well as fundamental ethical guidance.

“ There is a fine line between advice and audit,” Gray admits, “but it is not really an issue for us. If we’re ever concerned that there could be a conflict of interest, we always get another partner to do the audit; you have to be strict about it. But in general it just does not come up.”Gray argues that the business smaller firms conduct is simply not the same as in the Big Five; the risk involved is much lower; and clients have different expectations. “Most of our clients are family businesses who rely on us for general advice; they don’t have the expertise within their companies. Offering business advice is part and parcel of the service we offer.”

This view is backed up by London Economics’ research, which found that 52% of smaller companies considered their accountant to be their main business adviser, ahead of bank managers. ”We can offer consultants who really understand the business and know the people,” Harrison agrees.

He acknowledges that the audit threshold change is likely to affect small firms’ business opportunities, and is adamant that without their business consultancy work, many small firms would go out of business.

But the answer would not be to abandon audits altogether, he argues. ‘At the moment, the only thing that separates us from the non-qualified people who set themselves up as accountants is that we can do audit,’ he explains. ‘The training and experience requirements are very rigorous and they demonstrate our high standards. The biggest threat in the future is going to come from these non-professional accountants, who will be able to offer much lower fees because they invest nothing in training. At the moment they can only service companies below the threshold goes up to the $4.8m mark, they will be competing with firms like ours.’

Gray agrees that without consultancy work, the future will be jeopardized. “Our business growth is mainly in consultancy rather than audit because our clients tend to be smaller and change in audit threshold has affected them,’ he says. ‘We will continue to offer auditing services, and in fact got two new audit clients recently, but the real growth is likely to be in business consultancy.’

The reality is that just as management consultancy arms in the Big Five feed off the audit arms

and vice versa, so many smaller accounting firms are dependent on more than statutory audit for their survival. But, more importantly, businesses themselves depend on their accountants to be more than just auditors – they are business advisers, often fulfilling the role of finance director for those companies that can’t afford to employ one full time.

‘As a small firm you’ve got to keep up with changing times,’ says Gray. ‘There’s an increasing burden being heaped on small businesses by the government – they have huge amounts of paperwork and legal issues to deal with. We’ve got to keep ahead to offer the right advice when our clients need it.’