I continue to be disgusted by those amongst my fellow members of the auditing profession who have not told their clients that their company no longer has to be audited.

It was the new Companies Act of 2008 (which actually only came into law in 2011) that changed things.

If your company is owner managed and not doing hundreds of millions of turnover a year, then no audit is necessary.

You don’t even have to prepare fancy financial statements.

Owner managed simply means that the directors are the shareholders and (in the opinion of most professionals) still applies if a trust is the shareholder and the representative trustee is the director.

If your auditor hasn’t told you this, he deserves to be fired!

And, by the way, you don’t even need an auditor any more.

If your company is not owner managed then you need financial statements to International Financial Reporting Standards together with a review by a CA(SA), but not an audit.