ICSI to launch four auditing standards to maintain compliance and uniformity

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SME Times News Bureau | 24 Feb, 2018
The Institute of Company Secretaries of India (ICSI) on Saturday said it is set to introduce four new auditing standards to be followed by Company Secretaries across the country, that would harmonise the secretarial audit process and help maintain "quality and compliance" in the companies.

"We will soon be releasing four auditing standards for the secretarial audit and other certifications. These auditing standards are individual auditing standards to be followed by each and every practising Company Secretaries. Once these auditing standards are followed, the quality and the compliance would be maintained," ICSI President Makarand Lele told reporters here.

It is a mandate for all the listed companies in India to conduct secretarial audit through a practising company secretary since 2013. "This covers issues of compliance, core governance, core reporting,and core processes that a company is adopting," he said.

Lele also said that the new auditing standards are at their final stage and would be released within the next one or two months.

About the auditing standards to be introduced, he said it would include the appointment process of recruitment for the Company Secretaries, nuances of documentation, and secretarial audit process and hoped they would bring harmony in the auditing process.

"Also, whenever a new law is implemented, the compliance of those laws are required to be verified by the Company Secretaries," he pointed out.

Asked whether the Rs 11,300 crore Punjab National Bank scam, that has surfaced recently, has prompted them to introduce the new auditing standards, he said the Institute of Company Secretaries has no role to play in statutory audits that was at work in the PNB case.

"It would be difficult to directly comment on the alleged scam as it is a sub judice matter but we have to see if any corporate governance compromises has happened in the entire process or not," he added.