ICPAK guidance every practitioner should know
The ICPAK guidance a Kenyan practitioner should read on signing assurance reports, auditor reporting, firm management, LLPs and IFRS 9.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Accountants & audit firms in Kenya
Most Kenyan practitioners know the International Standards on Auditing and the ethics code well. Fewer could name the guidance ICPAK itself publishes for people who run firms and sign reports. That is a pity, because much of it answers the practical questions the standards leave open: who may sign what, how a firm should be organised and licensed, and how local rules sit beside international ones.
This article is a reading list with commentary. It walks through what ICPAK makes available to practitioners, explains why each item matters, and shows where Achekam fits when the guidance has to turn into a methodology and a report.
The starting point: international standards, adopted as issued
Before turning to ICPAK's own material, it helps to know what it sits on top of. IFAC, in its member profile of ICPAK under its membership obligation on auditing standards, reports that ICPAK has adopted the International Standards on Auditing as issued by the IAASB without modifications, including their effective dates.
That has a practical consequence. A Kenyan firm should not expect a local version of the ISAs with Kenyan changes. ICPAK's guidance tends to fill gaps around the standards rather than rewrite them: signing practice, report templates, firm structure and specific accounting questions.
Signing assurance engagements
Among ICPAK's assurance engagement resources is a Guideline on Signing Assurance Engagements, dated December 2013. It is older than much of the reporting material, but questions about who signs and how do not go out of date quickly.
Any partner who signs reports, and any manager who prepares them for signature, should have read it. It is also worth reading alongside the firm's own policy on signing, so that the policy and the guideline say the same thing.
Auditor reporting and illustrative reports
ICPAK's resources also include new and revised auditor reporting material and illustrative templates for auditors' reports. These are the most frequently used documents on the list, because they give a concrete model of the report a Kenyan auditor issues.
Use them as a check on the firm's own templates rather than a replacement. If the firm's standard unmodified report reads differently from ICPAK's illustration, find out why before the next signing season. How the Kenyan wording differs from other jurisdictions is covered in audit report wording for Nigeria and Kenya.
Running the firm: management and licensing
For the business side of a practice, ICPAK publishes a Firm Management Guide, material on firm registration and licensing, and a Council Circular on Licencing of Firms.
These are the documents a partner turns to when setting up a practice, admitting a new partner, opening a second office or changing what the firm offers. They are also useful background reading before an ICPAK quality review; preparing for an ICPAK quality review takes that further.
LLP conversions and IFRS 9 suspended interest
Two further items answer narrower questions.
- Guidelines for Conversion of CPA Firms into Limited Liability Partnerships. For a partnership considering an LLP, this is ICPAK's own guidance on the process. The legal side of the structure is discussed in CPA firms as limited liability partnerships.
- Guidance on suspended interest under IFRS 9 versus prudential guidelines. As its title says, it sets the IFRS 9 treatment of suspended interest beside prudential guidelines. Firms with lending clients will want it on file.
All of these items are collected on ICPAK's assurance engagements resources page, which carries the new and revised auditor reporting material, the illustrative report templates, the firm licensing circulars and the Firm Management Guide.
Turning guidance into methodology and reports in Achekam
Guidance only helps if it reaches the working papers and the report. Achekam has three places where that happens.
Methodology and templates. A firm's partners keep their own methodology and working-paper templates beside Achekam's platform methodology, which they can adopt. A template version is published only by someone other than its author. So when the firm updates its signing checklist after reading ICPAK's guideline, a second person reviews and publishes it before the team starts using it.
Report wording for Kenya. For a Kenyan engagement, the audit report draft uses Kenyan legal wording, citing the Companies Act 2015, and the partner owns the final text. That means ICPAK's illustrative reports remain the benchmark: the partner compares the draft with them and edits where the firm's policy or the circumstances call for it.
Drafting and approval. The engagement team drafts the auditor's report on standard ISA 700, ISA 705, ISA 706 and ISA 701 wording, covering unmodified, qualified, adverse and disclaimer opinions. Approval is refused while any bracketed placeholder remains, and only the engagement partner approves. The partner may approve with papers still open by recording a reason, but a named quality reviewer's clearance cannot be bypassed.
None of this replaces reading the guidance. It makes it easier to show that what the firm read is what the team used.
Building the firm's reading list
A simple approach that keeps the list alive:
- Download each item named above and save it in one shared folder, with the date you retrieved it.
- Assign each document to a partner who reads it and notes anything the firm should change.
- Update the methodology or templates for any change, and have someone other than the author publish the new version.
- Compare the firm's standard reports with ICPAK's illustrative templates once a year.
- Check ICPAK's resources page at the start of each year for new or revised material.
- Record what was reviewed and when, so a quality reviewer can see the trail.
A practical first step
Choose the two documents most relevant to your practice this season, probably the signing guideline and the illustrative reports, and put them on the agenda for the next partners' meeting. The rest of the list can follow one document at a time.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
