A relentless focus on quality

Quality and integrity are the central, fundamental principles that underpin everything that we do. Every audit, all of our business solutions, each piece of work we undertake — all are performed with integrity to meet our exacting and comprehensive standards for quality and consistency.

Our relentless focus on quality has never been more critical than in these uncertain and highly challenging times. There has never been a more necessary time for enhancing trust and confidence among investors, regulators, our clients, our people, capital markets and the communities in which we live and work.

We are on a continuous mission to drive sustainable improvements so as to continually uphold the highest levels of quality and trust in all areas of our work.

The way we think about quality is rooted in our Values, led by our focus on integrity. In 2020, we set forth our refreshed Values that guide our behaviors and inform how we act and work with each other and the clients we work for.

Across KPMG, we are investing in the quality of our processes, methodologies and systems to make sure the work that we do meets or exceeds the standards expected of both KPMG and our profession. A constant focus on quality allows us to continue to build trust and achieve our ambitious growth objectives.

There is no area of our business where quality is more important and where we are investing more than in audit.

Our commitment to audit quality is encompassed by our Global Quality Framework, a comprehensive approach to outline how we deliver quality at KPMG, and how everyone at KPMG contributes to its delivery. With the Global Quality Framework as our guide, we continue to move forward with efforts to enhance all aspects of our drive for quality.

When the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) recently approved a new and revised set of quality management standards, set to take effect in 2022, we were prepared. We not only support the new standards, we are investing and aggressively taking steps to implement them.

KPMG Clara delivers advanced digital capabilities:

As with every part of our business, technology is central to our global audit capabilities, and we are investing significantly in digitizing audit through the KPMG Clara smart audit platform. KPMG Clara is cloud-based, running on Microsoft Azure and is a true game-changer. It enhances audit quality and consistency and seamlessly brings more data-driven insights to the audit.

KPMG Clara seamlessly brings together the latest artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities within a single, cloud-based source, benefiting from our alliances with technology leaders like Microsoft and IBM Watson. So, our audit professionals can more readily tap into these advanced technologies for a greater depth of insights into risks and anomalies and key long-term business patterns.

KPMG Clara is currently being rolled out to all of our audit professionals globally.

We take our responsibility for quality seriously and we continue to take steps to raise the level of quality and consistency across the global organization. We have embedded audit quality into performance assessments and established a new global accreditation program for Advisory professionals that sets consistent standards for our professionals to become fully qualified in a solution before bringing it to a client.

Our strengthened focus on quality and integrity is being felt across our organization, with significant changes in the way we measure performance, train and develop our people. And our clients see a difference in us with notable wins in countries like South Africa where we have been chosen as auditor for some of the largest banks and institutions in the region.