EQC 6-Step to Avoiding Disaster

We will help you draft a system of quality management manual and anti-money laundering manual.  We will provide guidance to you on how to implement and comply with these two manuals with the least resources and time.  We will then provide you a list of frequently asked questions on these manuals from the practice review perspective and provide you with model answers.

Our Practice Aid is up to 100 pages long separated into 8 key sections.  We understand that while our consultancy services are mainly provided verbally, you may want to revisit our advices regularly over the next few months or years.  Thus, we can write a customized Practice Aid that covers everything you would need to be aware of in preparing for an AFRC Inspection. 

The practice aid is color coded and well-structured with an index that covers various stages of the preparation for an inspection, giving you highlights on what to look out for in each aspect of your practice, varying from completing AFRC inspection forms, drafting and implementing the system of quality management (SoQM) Manual, drafting and implementing the anti-money laundering (AML) Manual, focusing on key areas of audit engagements, and the frequently asked questions before, during and after an inspection.  The Practice Aid will be written specific to your needs, and acts as a great tool for you and your team to prepare for inspections. 

The color coding of our practice aid, will allow you to easily identify which action points should be done annually, at a point in time, or ongoing throughout the year, or specifically after certain compliance actions have been taken place, for example after an external monitoring review, or shortly after an inspection. 

We understand that you may not be readily available to have consultancy meetings to go through everything in your practice when the “Fire” is still far away.  So we now have a service to draft a customizable inspection preparation manual based on the circumstances of your practice, and the steps that you have to take if your practice is selected for inspection.  

Often, after a consultation engagement with us, practices just file away the SQM / AML manuals and the monitoring review reports, and would not look at them again.  To change this, the practice aid serves as a reference point that goes through all the documents you have to fill in and the potential issues that your practice has to address to prepare for an imminent inspection, and you can prepare for it on your own timing. 

A monitoring review package includes an Ongoing Policy Monitoring Review for a 1-year period and a Completed File Review.  In the past, monitor reviewers have only been able to help you identify where the problems are.  Not only will we help to identify deficiencies that inspectors would focus on, and we will also help you identify areas that your audit team can spend less time on.  We will ignore problems that, in our experience, a inspector would also ignore. 

We can help to draft technical memorandum on your significant issues.  These may include, but not limited to:

• Adoption of new accounting / auditing standards
• Revenue Recognition 
• Valuation of Material Assets, such as investment properties, business, shipping vessels
• Justification for acceptance of a new client when prior period opinions are modified
• Justification for going concern basis

These memorandum can help to concentrate all your objectives, risk assessment, application of accounting standards, internal control understanding, audit procedures and analysis of results and findings in one lengthy audit documentation, and thus allow easier review by AFRC inspectors, and they will not ask you to identify where the documentation is done on specific audit procedures relating to this significant risk area. 

We provide with a step-by-step guidance on how the AFRC conducts inspection starting from the notification email, to how the forms should be completed at each stage of the inspection.  We will provide you with illustrative wordings that are customized to your practice’s operations, client portfolio, size, number of employees and complexity of audit clients’ businesses.  

We will give you a written deliverable in the form of a Practice Aid (See Step 2), that will demonstrate to you the type of questions that the inspection team may specifically challenge regarding your practice’s SoQM, AML, Ethics, Engagement Files, Client Acceptance procedures, and more. This will give you a peace of mind that when, or if, your practice is selected, then you will know exactly what to do, and how to prepare for it even before the email is sent to you.  

The lowest cost of a full-time audit junior would be around HK$13,000 per month, assuming a 5-day work-week, the time cost would be HK$590 per work-day.  For a set of well-documented audit programs, there are roughly 200 pages per audit engagement, would it be safe to assume that a very competent audit junior may take up to 6-8 hours to fully complete them? This is equivalent to HK$440 to HK$590 of time cost. 

Putting the many uncertainties aside, some of which may include a shortage of audit juniors, language barriers, poor written English, mounting training costs for inexperienced audit staff, lack of audit concepts and their frequent non-compliance with auditing standards.  We can go on and on. 

We are pleased to introduce our game changer: Audit Program 3.0.  A custom-prepared 200-page audit program specific to the details of your audit engagement.  An editable excel file will be provided to you, with a system modified date that is dated well before your archive due date – from as low as HK$300 per audit engagement for bulk purchases of 500 or more credits. (Original price is HK$600 per credit for 100 audit engagements).

You no longer have to pay hefty upfront costs to buy working paper templates or audit software, which would still require an additional budget for training and audit inefficiencies, and more often than not, these trained staff may “jump-ship” to other firms after a short period of employment.  Imagine all the recurring fixed costs that you can start saving today