Chartered Auditors Brief MSc 2025 | UoS

Chartered Auditors – Brief

Chartered Auditors is the Country’s body responsible for the members of the auditing profession. Its purpose is:

“To ensure that there are members of the audit profession with integrity, expertise, and judgment necessary to support the development of the Country and the economy.”

It sets the standards for membership of the auditing profession in the Country, administers the membership exams, sets and collects the fees, issues the Practising Certificates (without which members of the profession cannot legally trade), runs the mandatory CPD (Continuing Professional Development) programme for members and, on occasions, runs disciplinary panels around member conduct (serious transgressions can result in members of the profession being struck from the members’ register and barred from practicing). Chartered Auditors liaises with universities on the development pathway for new members (which usually includes bachelor’s degrees), and connects with similar bodies in other countries on the development of global standards and ethics for the profession. In addition, Chartered Auditors provides a voice for the auditing profession on matters relating to the role of auditors in the development of the economy in the Country.

There are around 50,000 current members of the auditing profession in the country, some work in private practice (in firms of varying sizes up to and including the ‘Big Four’) while others work on the ‘client side’, in public and private sector organisations. A small number work in academic institutions.

Chartered Auditors gets income from membership fees, exam fees, events (those it stages itself and events when other organisations hire its premises). Its role is not to generate financial profit (it likes to make a small trading surplus each year to provide a financial cushion) but to represent the interests of the audit profession, as outlined in its purpose statement.

The governing body of the Chartered Auditors organisation is a board of 15 people, all of whom are elected from the membership (each board member can serve on the board for five years). The board has several sub-committees, including one which looks at the organisation’s strategy. The Chartered Auditors organisation has a staff of 160 people, led by a CEO. It has a conventional hierarchical structure which mirrors its main areas of activity, for example, separate departments for ‘membership’, ‘professional development and qualifications’,
‘professional standards’ and ‘events’ (including renting out capacity in its head office ‘Audit House’ (located in a prominent area of the Country’s capital city) for clients wanting a smart venue for meetings/conferences, etc).

Chartered Auditors’ strategy is written up in its sixteen-page ‘Advance and Excel’ publication and also shown on the organisation’s website. The organisation is three and a half years into its current five-year strategy, ‘Advance and Excel’. The strategy explains the overall purpose of the organisation, its strategic goals in each of its areas of work, and the main twenty strategic actions it intends to implement during the course of the strategy. Each one of these actions is linked to intended outcomes/KPIs.

Chartered Auditors wishes to commission some consultancy work to help it evaluate and improve its implementation of ‘Advance and Excel’ and strengthen alignment with the organisation’s strategy over the remaining period of this strategy (to ensure the maximum utility from the strategy). The consultants will have access to the Chartered Auditors organisation and the ‘strategy’ subcommittee of the board. The CEO doesn’t feel there is anything fundamentally wrong with the strategy but wishes to make sure the organisation is en route to achieving what it sets out to do. Demonstrating this strategic competence should help the CEO win support from the board the next time the organisation’s strategy is formally refreshed (to be launched in 18 months).

Chartered Auditors would like this work to be completed within six weeks. The budget available is around $20,000 (your firm charges its senior consultants out at $2,000 per day). The main deliverable is a presentation to the Chartered Auditors Strategy Sub-Committee with recommendations of what Chartered Auditors should do (if anything) to further strengthen its alignment with the strategic actions and its commitment to their execution.