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ACCA Strategic Professional · Advanced Audit and Assurance (International) · Reporting on other assignments

Orchid Retail's directors have prepared a sustainability report using their own internally developed measures of 'community benefit'. The measures are not published and are known only to management. Before accepting an assurance engagement on the report, the practitioner is considering whether the criteria are suitable. Which characteristic of suitable criteria is most clearly lacking?

Availability to intended users is lacking. Suitable criteria must be accessible so users understand how the subject matter was measured. Because Orchid's community benefit measures are unpublished and known only to management, readers cannot understand the basis, which makes the criteria unsuitable on that characteristic.

  1. AAvailability to the intended usersCorrect
  2. BRelevance to the users' decisions
  3. CCompleteness of the reported items
  4. DNeutrality of the measurement basis

Explanation

Suitable criteria must be relevant, complete, reliable, neutral and understandable, and they must be available to intended users so they can understand how the subject matter was evaluated. Here the measures are unpublished and known only to management, so availability is the clearest failing. The scenario gives no evidence that the other characteristics fail, so they are not the most obvious deficiency.

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