Why assurance and advisory reports look the way they do: a discourse analysis of submissions to an Australian Royal Commission

The purpose of this study was to analyse the Executive Summaries of assurance and advisory reports submitted by Professional Service Firms (PSF) as evidence to the Australian 2018 – 2019 Royal Commission into the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry. The 32 Word and PowerPoint documents in this dataset were reviews by PSFs of large corporations’ financial controls, policies and procedures and are often relied on by regulators and stakeholders to ensure the integrity and reliability of financial institutions. Following CGA principles, a variety of research methods were employed to investigate this hard to access but influential discourse community, including genre analysis, multimodal analysis and interviews. Results indicated that the Executive Summaries are a pliable and hybrid genre, made up of mainly optional stages which are sequenced in a variety of patterns to meet the writers’ surface and private purposes. Their writers collaborate with their clients to write the reports, although the tenor of the documents is impersonal and objective. Visual semiotics are used, particularly in the PowerPoint documents, however language is the main meaning making resource. These results were taken as evidence of the value of CGA in helping to investigate the discursive practices of an opaque but essential professional community.