Fundamental or enhancing roles? The dual roles of external auditors and forensic accountants

In view recent developments which have resulted in the replacement of attributes of relevance and reliability with a new categorization of fundamental qualitative characteristics of accounting information and enhancing qualitative characteristics of accounting information, this chapter is aimed at highlighting why the roles of audits - and particularly accountants and auditors still serve as fundamental, vital and crucial means of verifying financial statements - such that these can be reasonably relied upon by investors in financial and capital markets. Fundamental qualitative characteristics of accounting information are categorized into relevance and faithful representation - a change from the IASB's 1989 framework. The enhancing qualitative characteristics of accounting information now comprise verifiability, understandability, comparability and timeliness. This chapter is aimed at highlighting why such enhancing characteristics could be regarded as fundamental qualitative characteristics.