Compliance PwC

2022 Audit Quality Report: PwC’s Focus on Audit Quality


Sponsored by PwC

Trust in audit quality plays a significant role in the financial reporting ecosystem. PwC's 2022 Audit Quality Report discusses how culture and value, people, audit process and approach to quality management are vital in driving quality outcomes.

©Bakhtiar_Zein/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Trust has never been more important than it is today. There’s a strong connection between audit quality and capital markets, and it does not occur by chance. The role auditors play in the financial reporting ecosystem is underpinned by the need for trust and our ability to deliver quality services, valuable insights and meaningful solutions. Audit quality and independence are foundational for building trust in our capital markets by helping to provide enhanced confidence in the quality of information. Assurance delivered by independent auditors is critical for the health of our financial and capital markets.  

Audit quality is and always will be our number one priority. PwC’s 2022 Audit Quality Report shares how our culture and values, people, audit process, and approach to quality management support our quality objectives. 

Our culture and values: 

Our purpose is to build trust in society and solve important problems. We expect our professionals to exhibit the core values underlying our purpose, as these values define the expectations, we have for working with each other and our clients.  

Doing business, the right way, conducting business with integrity, maintaining independence, safeguarding the information entrusted to us, preserving necessary records, and competing and winning fairly in the marketplace are key components of our ethics policies, training, and awareness activities. Further, our independence systems and processes support our people in maintaining and monitoring independence, which is why we launched Personal independence at PwC to make it easy and seamless for our professionals to maintain and monitor independence. 

Our people: 

We are focused on being the world’s leading developer of talent with a desired outcome of quality client services, greater engagement of our people, and an inclusive environment that allows our people to reach their full potential. This year we launched My+, which will provide our people the power to build personalized careers, from choosing the types of assignments they work on, to the hours they work to where they work and the benefits they need.  

Our retention policy has also evolved in response to increasing voluntary turnover rates, where we took several key steps to further promote retention of our audit professionals, by not only providing them with greater flexibility in how and where they work, but also by finding more ways to recognize their contributions with meaningful rewards. By continuing to further integrate team members located at the Acceleration Centers on our audits, we were able to manage workload in response to increasing turnover rates which helped our teams continue to meet the needs of our clients, while also creating opportunities for our audit professionals to take on more challenging work earlier in their careers and to provide value-add insights to our clients. 

Continuous learning is a fundamental aspect of our culture. We take measures to reinforce the importance of learning to an individual’s professional development, including providing our audit professionals with sufficient time to complete training courses and assessments. In addition, the continued digital upskilling of our audit teams allows us to build on our base data analysis and other technological capabilities to enhance quality, increase efficiency, and improve the audit experience. Audit team members located at the Acceleration Centers are similarly provided access to a wide range of digital upskilling, as well as training specific to their responsibilities. 

Our DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) strategy drives equity within the firm from recruitment to partnership—with our systems, programs, and processes designed to support all our people so that every person has the same opportunities to grow to their full potential. 

Our annual Purpose Report details our commitments to DEI, operating responsibly in sustainable ways, and driving a human-led, tech-powered approach. 

Our audit process: 

Rooted in our core values, Tomorrow’s audit, today reflects our view of the future — people-led, enhanced by powerful technology, and digitally amplified. Driven by a quality-first, purpose-always mindset, our people deliver an audit that focuses on simplification, standardization, specialization, and automation. 

Aura, the PwC Network’s cloud-based audit platform, helps our teams deliver an audit tailored to our clients’ business. Our award-winning data visualization, analytics, and auditing tools are designed to enhance our risk assessment process and facilitate automated testing and data validation to support the different phases of the audit. Our digitally fluent audit team members also use Digital Lab to find, build, and share digital assets to enhance audit quality and efficiency. 

Download our 2022 Audit Quality Report to read about how our culture and values, people, audit process, and approach to quality management support our quality objectives.