Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 9 July 2025
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Enterprise, Tourism and Employment
Irish Auditing and Accounting Supervisory Authority: Engagement with Chairperson
2:00 am
Mr. Kevin Prendergast:
The way the world tends to work in this area is there is something called mutual reliance. Standards in auditing, for example, are global standards. They apply in every country that has applied those standards. As I said, we have something called mutual reliance, which means if, say, an overseas audit firm is carrying out an audit of an entity operating there, we place reliance on the local regulator to do its work and, in turn, it places reliance on us in Ireland to do our work. What we do at the international forum level is come together to do inspection workshops, training workshops and enforcement workshops, as well as information sharing. We host webinars and we have an annual plenary. We hosted the inspection workshop in Dublin last year. We had 150 people from all over the world and it was all about training and development. It is a mixture of global standards and global training to try to make sure we keep standards high.