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Audit reports

Published on June 30, 2026   8 min

A selection of talks on Finance, Accounting & Economics

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0:00
This is David Hay from the University of Auckland. In this talk, we're talking about audit reports. These are the formal reports by which auditors report to the stakeholders of the company what they have found.
0:14
Audit reports, also called audit opinions, are the summary of the work that the auditor has done and the means by which auditors communicate to the users. In this talk, I'm going to use two example reports. One of them is an American company, Apple. The other one is a British one, BP PLC. They're easy to obtain online if you want to look at them in more detail. We'll see how they're slightly different. Let's look a bit more closely at what you might see if you look at these reports. Let's look first of all at the Apple one.
0:42
If you look this report up, you'll see that it says "Statement by the independent registered public accounting firm, which happens to be EY in this case, a Big Four firm. EY say, "In our opinion, the financial statements present fairly in all material respects the financial position of the company and the results of its operations and cash flows." So 'Fairly presented' is the term that they use, and we've talked about that in previous talks. Of course, that's what auditors aim for.
1:12
We can also easily look at the BP report. BP is a petroleum company previously known as British Petroleum and is still quite widely known by that title. Now BP's audit report is from Deloitte. They start off by saying, "In our opinion, the financial statements give a true and fair view of the state of the group's and parent company's affairs and the group's profit for the year then ended." They're saying true and fair, and while it might seem like an international difference, it's really not. The international standards on auditing allow for these two statements and either can be used, and they're treated as equivalent. The standards say that they're the same; that those two statements are equivalent and they mean the same thing. In a lot of countries, auditors really do have that choice. They can choose between saying fairly presented, or they can choose true or fair, and that's the report that auditors are aiming for, trying to make sure that the financial statements are fairly presented or true and fair, and that they can say so. They do have other options as we'll see a little bit later. Audit reports contain some more information than that, of course as well. The report on Apple is five pages.

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