Wiley Practitioner's Guide to GAAS 2013: Covering all SASs, SSAEs, SSARSs, and Interpretations

PREFACE

The AICPA’s Clarity Project

Background

Following the creation of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), the AICPA’s Auditing Standards Board (ASB) reassessed its mission. The ASB developed a plan to converge US generally accepted auditing standards (GAAS) with the International Standards on Auditing (ISAs) issued by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB). Thus, the ASB’s Clarity Project began work to:

• Redraft the auditing standards for clarity—to make the standards easier to read, understand, and apply
• Converge US standards with the ISAs

The ASB is close to completing its project, and the new clarified standards are generally effective for audits of financial statements with periods ending on or after December 15, 2012. For legal and practice inspection purposes, the ASB decided early adoption was not appropriate. However, auditors may implement aspects of the new standards as long as they also comply with the current standards.

While clarity and convergence, not change, were the goals of the Clarity Project, the Project did create some changes that will require auditors to make changes in practice. This book arranges information according to the sections of the AICPA’s auditing standards codification. In this edition of Wiley GAAS, because some readers will use it for audits that fall under the extant standards, we will use a dual guidance approach. The extant standards and the extant codification arrangement remain. However, ...