Enhancing companies’ credibility through audit ensures that stakeholders make informed decisions based on these companies’ financial statements. In parallel, public oversight ensures audit quality.

The revised EU statutory audit rules significantly impact how the public oversight of statutory auditors and audit firms is organised. Designated public oversight bodies have the ultimate responsibility for the oversight of the audit profession. They can delegate certain tasks to other authorities and professional bodies.

This survey presents the impact of the new rules. Our findings show that the national public oversight bodies now carry out many activities previously in the competence of the professional bodies.

This survey also provides an overview of how the public oversight is organised in each of the 28 EU Member States, Iceland and Norway, i.e. composition, funding, transparency and key activities of the national public oversight bodies and delegation of tasks to other bodies.

This publication is based on the input of our members and it is part of a series of work done by Accountancy Europe on the new rules on statutory audit. It follows up on our 2015 survey Organisation of the public oversight of the audit profession in 23 European countries.