Financial statement audit

KPMG Clara is our cloud-based smart audit platform, designed to facilitate a higher quality audit and produce more seamless and transparent interactions between you and your engagement team. This secure online platform offers a centralized portal that serves as a single source for the exchange of important information, including valuable insight into the status of your audit. It houses advanced, predictive analytics capabilities within a single, cloud-based source and seamlessly adopts the latest cognitive and Artificial Intelligence solutions. This allows KPMG professionals to tap into advanced technologies that bring clients a greater range and depth of insights into risks and anomalies. It can also unleash the potential of your data by helping you see meaningful patterns across your business at a deeper level than before.

Throughout your audit, you will have access to KPMG Clara client collaboration, giving you a 24/7 window into the status of your audit, all in one place. The net result is greater interaction with your engagement team — with more targeted and meaningful conversations about specific findings, risks and insights. Your audit will also benefit from our alliances with leading technology companies — IBM Watson and Microsoft — working to ensure our technology and capabilities are second to none. It is all part of the transformation of audit to harness the power of leading technology to provide higher quality results.

Our audit methodology is based on a thorough understanding of your business, industry, processes, objectives and strategies. This knowledge guides us in identifying and assessing risks that may impact the true and fair view of your financial statements. It is designed to meet national and international standards, and all of our professionals throughout our member firms around the world are guided by the same approach to methodology, processes and documentation. All audit professionals attend regular training to ensure their knowledge of audit principles and financial reporting issues is up-to-date.

Through our multidisciplinary approach, audit engagement teams – comprised of professionals in areas such as information risk management tax, forensics, and valuation – are provided with a broad understanding of an organization, thereby enabling teams to focus on key areas of risk, adequacy of internal controls and potential fraud.

The duty of our auditing business is to serve the public interest. Audit quality is critically important to maintaining integrity and public trust in our profession amid the intense and unprecedented scrutiny we face today. We are determined to set the standard for audit quality across our profession.

True audit quality remains our highest priority. It demands that every audit we undertake is consistently executed in line with the requirements and intent of all applicable professional standards, within a strong system of exacting KPMG quality controls.

As audit professionals, we understand our special responsibility to meet — and strive to exceed — public expectations. Continuous quality improvement is fundamental to enhancing trust and confidence among investors, regulators, our clients, our people, capital markets and the communities in which we work and live.

KPMG continues to invest significantly in audit quality, building on our sound audit quality foundations, in terms of how the organization and audit engagements are managed. This means considerable ongoing investment in our quality management, global monitoring of audit quality and enhanced support, technology and tools for engagement teams.