ON THE NEED FOR THE FURTHER HARMONIZATION OF PUBLIC AND CORPORATE AUDIT STANDARDS IN RUSSIA

Abstract

Government auditing occupies one of the most important places in the system of forms of the state financial control over the use of public resources. Public audit is exercised at all levels of power, and its main functions are to prevent, identify and correct the existing violations and distortions. Corporate (independent) audit, being a method of exercising non-departmental independent financial control, does not interchange public financial control. In both types of audit there are standards - regulatory documents providing requirements for the auditor's operation - as well as the principles, methods and procedures used in auditing. As modern economy is affected by a whole range of the clear-cut previously unknown factors (digitalization, pandemic, a combination of globalization and de-globalization, unification), it is necessary to analyze the normative acts governing all types of financial control in Russia from the point of view of their harmonization, that is, correspondence to each other in terminology, ideology and methodology.
The article analyzes the standards of both types of audit: both the International Standards on Auditing, regulating independent auditing, and the standards of the Accounts Chamber of the Russian Federation, as external public auditing standards. The authors emphasise both similarities and differences in certain aspects of the researched documents and draw the conclusion that there is a need for the further harmonization of these standards in order to make the financial control bodies operate more efficiently.