CA ANZ and ACCA appreciate the IAASB and IESBA undertaking this survey jointly. The work of the two boards is closely connected and effective collaboration is essential to maintain interoperability and audit and assurance quality. We encourage the boards to focus on setting standards for professional accountants, prioritising projects that fall within their mandates and respond to clear market needs. Recent projects have instead focused on profession-agnostic developments. Standard setting projects should not be approved without clear evidence of either the existence of market demand for change or of a systemic problem that requires a standard setting response.

While our responses to the survey had comments on several of the key trends impacting the profession, we also reiterated that the default response to those trends does not need to be standard setting.

Our response highlighted the importance of collaboration, agile standard setting, appropriate consideration of the impact of technology and the need to focus on continuing to encourage global adoption of the standards.