'We are very much at the leading edge of this one,' she said.

While all other standards looked at how individual audits are done, the new standard will assess how companies can guarantee audit quality.

Ms McBride said it was the first time that standards looked at the firm's quality control procedure and would make sure the firm had the right number of staff, their training was sufficient, staff were sufficiently knowledgeable about the area they were working on, their workload was not too heavy and management had the right attitude.

The institute sent a questionnaire to members handling listed companies late last year asking them if their practices met the new standard. The rest of the association's member firms would be receiving forms halfway through 2007.

She said the institute was looking for firms that did not have a suitable quality control programme for the work they wanted to do or were not following practices set down in the newly created standard.

The institute's Practice Review Committee would then investigate all member companies identified by the survey as having quality maintenance issues, said Ms McBride.

Investigators would take between a day to four weeks to review the Auditing Practice to make sure the firm had the right level of quality control in place and suggest improvements. Investigators would look at the entire firm instead of one particular audit to get an overview of how well the practice worked.

The measures were all part of an ongoing practice review to maintain high standards in Hong Kong's accountancy industry, with more benchmarks due to be revealed throughout the year, said Ms McBride. To facilitate this proactive role, the committee needed to hire three lead investigators and six junior investigators to make up three teams.

The lead investigators would be from auditing, forensic accounting fields, or from other investigative accountancy fields and have eight years or more experience with different sized companies. Junior investigators would need to have five or more years of experience.

Successful recruits would need to spend a large portion of their time outside the office.

Ms McBride said a knowledge of how practices of all sizes worked was also important, as quality control programmes could vary with the size of the company.

Promotion prospects were excellent as the institute was growing with the industry and had to ensure the city's accountants maintained high standards, said Ms McBride.

Companies need not worry about being unduly punished for something that was not up to standard, because the reviews were carried out to ensure practices remained healthy.

Ms McBride said just as it was very rare for somebody attending a health check to be rushed into hospital the next day, the chances of investigators finding anything drastically wrong with companies was equally rare.

'In most cases, when you go to a health check, you'll just be told to do things you know you should be doing but haven't got round to doing yet,' said Ms McBride.

Meanwhile, the institute said it would hand its other role as a watchdog to the newly created Financial Reporting Council.

Shum Man-to, the chief executive of the Financial Reporting Council, which should be fully operational by the middle of the year, said the body would not only investigate complaints about auditing and reporting irregularities, but deal with them using a wider range of tools.

It would take three to four months for complaints to be followed up. Previously, the association could only deal with members, but the new body would be able to refer auditors from other countries through their parent organisations to the Hong Kong court system if they failed to meet the conditions of the financial reporting ordinance.

The council is also seeking auditors for investigative teams that it is forming. Two auditors with eight or more years of experience and two with three to five years of experience are being sought. Mr Shum said that, ideally, people should have a great deal of initiative as well as show intelligence, integrity and perseverance. He said the council was not hiring general auditors and would outsource any extra workload according to demand.