Investors and analysts have asked auditors to reveal the extent to which management has been 'aggressive' with its accounting policies in the financial statements.

They have also called for management's preliminary statements to the market to be audited, in surprise that they were not, and asked for greater disclosure on banking covenants.

The views of this group of users of financial reports were sought by PwC and released in its Assurance today and tomorrow report, which canvassed the views of 104 investors and analysts around the world.

'It would be very helpful to know where people push the boundaries. If all companies could be ranked in terms of aggressiveness or conservative accounting policies, as judged by their auditors, that would be helpful information,' one participant said in the report.

PwC's deputy global assurance head, Richard Sexton, said that participants did however understand it might be difficult to provide some of the insight they wanted.

'Participants did see the difficulty of providing meaningful insight, when querying how "aggressiveness" could be defined or benchmarked in practice. I think the message coming across is that investors are interested in understanding whether it is possible to calibrate the relative aggressiveness across a range of policies,' said Sexton.

The firm has to now consider how it might deal with the range of requests presented by the survey participants.

Sexton added: 'I think the starting point that we need to come back to is that the auditors have a huge amount of communication with the audit committee, who are representatives of the shareholders. And there are many auditing standards that relate specifically to those charged with governance and in addition, our firm, and major competitors are constantly striving to improve communication to that very important group of people.'

However the survey revealed that most investors had never had any contact with the audit committee, while a large number - 39% - questioned the independence of the audit committee.

'There is an opportunity here for the market to respond. Audit committees are a key part of governance and it is an interesting observation that shareholders don't' seem to be communicating with them,' said Sexton.

On audit committee independence, Sexton said that investors did not have a clear understanding as to the total governance structure of which audit committees were a significant part.

'Many admitted that they had to improve their knowledge and understanding. I think the finding should encourage everyone to redouble efforts to explain what they do and don't do,' he said.