In 2023/2024 there are some fundamental changes being made to both the reporting and assurance standards for Tier 3 and 4 charities in New Zealand. As a result there is a period of cross over when clients will be adopting the new Tier 3 and 4 reporting standards.
The new reporting standards have a mandatory date of 1 April 2024, meaning they must be applied for accounting periods that begin on or after 1 April 2024 (y/e 31 March 2025). However, some entities have early adopted, which they are allowed to before the mandatory date for accounting periods that end after the Standards took effect on 15 June 2023. So potentially there will be jobs coming for audit from y/e 30 June 2023 up to y/e 31 May 2025 that could be reporting under the old standards or under the new ones.
Based on this we have prepared new audit templates that provide these options as follows:
You will note some additional changes made to the new templates as follows:
- We have reduced the number of templates for Tier 4 from two to just one "LCE" version as we think that a Tier 4 will always be better to use the "LCE" version (a cut down template that assumes no controls testing and streamlines the audit process by leaving out references to standards or parts of standards that will be very unlikely to apply.)
- We no longer have a separate template for Tier 3 that excludes group options. Instead when a question asks if the entity is part of a group and "no" is selected the content for groups will be hidden or marked as "n/a." An LCE version for Tier 3 remains.
- The newer (2024) templates include the requirements of the new Service Performance standard NZ AS1 (revised). It is applicable for periods beginning on or after 1 January 2024 - but it may be early-adopted for periods ending after 24 August 2023. You will note that there is a small difference between the adoption dates of the Tier 3 and 4 standards and NZ AS-1 (Revised). We opted to include both changes in the 2024 templates, although technically there could be a y/e 31 December 2024 job that would be required to use NZ AS1 (revised) but could still be reporting using the old Tier 3 and 4 standards. In this case we suggest changing to the new 2024 templates but using the stand-alone reporting checklist for the old Tier 3 or 4 instead of the new NFP checklists built in.
In terms of Tier 1 and 2 templates, our NZ Large PBE Audits (2024) now cover both Tier 1 and 2 options, and include the NZ AS1 (revised) requirements, so must be used for periods beginning 1 January 2024 - but there is no reason not to early adopt if the client is reporting Service Performance Information as the NZ AS1 (revised) requirements are more aligned with PBE FRS 48.