Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I move amendment No. 22:

In page 51, between lines 32 and 33, to insert the following:“ ‘penalty’ includes a sanction and a measure;”.

This is a technical amendment to align the language of the Bill with that of EU law. Both the EU audit directive and regulation refer to "sanctions and measures". However, some of the provisions of this Bill refer to "penalty"’. Accordingly, this amendment inserts a new definition for "penalty"’ to clarify that it includes a "sanction" and a "measure".

As we are speaking on section 51, I would like to signal that I may be tabling further amendments to this section on Report Stage. This is a large section, inserting a whole new Part into the Companies Act 2014. It includes provisions relating to the approval of statutory auditors, duties of statutory auditors in particular with respect to independence, public oversight tasks such as continuing education and quality assurance inspections, international oversight arrangements, and obligations on the entities being audited such as rotation of auditors.

As the committee will appreciate, much of this is concerned with the technical requirements of statutory audit. While the Bill was published in November 2017, I am still receiving some comments of a technical nature with regard to the contents of this section. Furthermore, due to the fact that we are working within the context of the Companies Act, it may be necessary to make adjustments to other Parts of the Act to take account of this new Part. For example, there seems to be a need to ensure that there is consistency in the terminology here with that in Part 6 of the Act. In some places the Bill speaks of "consolidated financial statements" while in others it uses the term "group accounts".

I will bring forward any further necessary amendments on Report Stage.