Professor Krista Fiolleau from the University of Waterloo presents:
Cataloguing the Marketplace of Assurance Services
(by Bauer, Boritz, Fiolleau, Pomeroy, Vitalis and Wang)
Abstract
We report findings from an extensive web search designed to catalogue the marketplace of assurance services beyond financial statement audits. We identify 33 areas where assurance services are currently offered or are emerging, and we document the contextual features of the services in each area. We also build a framework for the successful expansion of service offerings by CPA firms.
The framework asks two questions about the services in each area:
Are criteria available to evaluate the subject matter?
Is the subject matter within the expertise of financial statement auditors?
We use the framework to categorize the areas into those we expect CPA firms to pursue, those we expect them to avoid, and those where we expect successful expansion is uncertain. Finally, we evaluate our expectations against our observations of where CPA firms are present, and we discuss future research opportunities and implications for the CPA profession.