ASIC takes action against SMSF auditors

The Australian Tax Office (ATO) alerted ASIC to 18 auditors who breached independence requirements due to their involvement in reciprocal audit arrangements.

ASIC said on Monday, 7 March, that the move was made in an effort to “protect the integrity” of SMSF audits, with the auditors in question all involved in reciprocal audit arrangements “which create self-interest and familiarity and threaten independence”.

“Each of the reciprocal audit arrangements involved two SMSF auditors who audited each other’s personal SMSFs. There are no safeguards that can reduce the threats to an acceptable level and the auditors should not have entered into the arrangements,” ASIC said in a statement.

“Consequently, ASIC accepted voluntary cancellation requests from nine of the SMSF auditors and imposed additional conditions on the registration of the other nine.”

Additional conditions included restrictions to auditing their personal funds and agreeing to independent reviews and declarations to be made to ASIC.

“It should now be clear to SMSF auditors that entering into reciprocal audit arrangements is an unacceptable breach of their independence requirements,” the regulator said.

“ASIC will disqualify auditors for such breaches where appropriate.”

Neil Griffiths

Neil is the Deputy Editor of the wealth titles, including ifa and InvestorDaily.

Neil is also the host of the ifa show podcast.