We all know what auditors do with financial statements. They do an audit and, at least for bigger companies, they give fairly long report these days. But the financials are at the back of most annual reports. Do auditors have a look at the rest of the annual report – the stuff at the front? Surely they must. They must at least have a quick look some of the numbers, don’t they? The answer, unfortunately, is ‘sort of’, and misconceptions abound.

‘Sort of’, quite rightly, will not do any more. Annual reports are now enormous documents covering myriad specialist areas. The front end is hugely important and the work auditors perform on it varies widely. It still is not possible to ‘audit’ or even ‘review’ the whole of that front end simply because of a lack of sufficiently detailed criteria (ie, standards) against which to evaluate the material.

But sta