Mahoney Times: Mahoney Passes 2021 Peer Review

By Roz Allyson, CPA, Managing Partner

Peer reviews are required of all public accounting firms that provide attestation work within the scope of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) practice monitoring standards. The peer review is required under both the AICPA and Minnesota Society of Certified Public Accountants (MNCPA) bylaws. Also, in order to renew our firm permit with the Minnesota Board of Accountancy we must have a peer review performed every 3 years.

So, what does a peer review entail? A peer review is intended to provide the reviewer with a reasonable basis of expressing an opinion as to whether Mahoney (1) has designed a system of quality control for our accounting and auditing practice that is in accordance with AICPA quality standards and (2) is complying with the quality control policies and procedures in a way that will provide the firm with reasonable assurance of conforming with professional standards. The potential ratings are Pass, Pass with Deficiencies, and Fail.

We engaged the accounting firm of KerberRose to conduct our peer review. KerberRose is a Wisconsin firm with approximately 160 professional staff that has experience with real estate, nonprofit, and employee benefit plan audits. Our quality control policies were evaluated in a number of ways, including interviewing staff, looking at CPE records, and many other administrative records.

The peer reviewers also selected a sample of our audit, review, compilation, and other attestation engagements to review. In addition, since we are members of the Government Audit Quality Center (GAQC) and the Employee Benefit Plan Audit Quality Center (EBPAQC), the peer reviewers were required to review at least one of each of those engagements in order for us to remain members of the centers.

I am happy to report that we were notified by the MNCPA in December that our peer review was accepted by the MNCPA Peer Review Committee Report Acceptance Body (RAB) and we received a rating of Pass.

Thank you to our entire Team for their hard work on maintaining high quality as we serve our clients!

You can view a copy of our latest Peer Review report, here.