Transparency Report 2021 - Fiona Kendrick transcript

As I reflect on my first year as chair of the Public Interest Body, or PIB, I’m pleased at how we’ve continued to deliver on our core purpose, despite the uncertainty that we’ve all experienced over the last 12 months. 

The PIB’s purpose is to build stakeholder confidence and trust through independent oversight. The PIB consists of a majority of independent non-executives, like myself, and together we focus on enhancing stakeholder confidence in the public interest aspects of the firm’s activities. 

We have oversight across a range of matters, including the firm’s policies and procedures for promoting audit quality, helping the firm to secure its reputation more broadly across the business, as well as reducing the risk of firm failure. 

We set our own agenda and we focus on the matters that we regard as being in the public interest. 

Naturally the PIB has spent a significant amount of time considering and debating the complex subject of corporate governance and audit reform. Enhancing audit quality, and building trust and resilience in the corporate reporting ecosystem, must be considered alongside the wider benefits that business can bring to society. And importantly, that includes a focus on an audit profession that continues to be able to attract the brightest talent. 

Beyond this, we’ve been actively engaged in the oversight of the firm’s operational separation transition plans. As part of operational separation, and its commitment to strengthen the governance of our audit practice, the firm established a committee of the PIB called the Audit Oversight Body, or AOB, back in November 2020. The AOB is chaired by Philip Rycroft, and has a clear audit specific remit. 

Looking ahead, it remains a very important time for the profession, and the PIB has a key role to play by continuing to work actively to oversee management, and provide constructive challenge, to discuss firmwide matters of mutual interest with the supervisory board, and to understand the output of the AOB so that we can provide effective and robust oversight across the whole firm. 

We will also continue to engage constructively with the FRC, and of course its successor organisation, on important topics including the Audit Firm Governance Code consultation, from which the PIB’s duties flow. 

Along with my fellow non-executives, I look forward to another year of robust and challenging discussions about the public interest aspects of the firm’s work.

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