Various possible developments are reviewed in chapter 10 of Getting to Grips with Audit [PDF, 27KB]
Perhaps the most important of these issues is the impact of the economic downturn on institutions and their funding partners. The importance of good risk management cannot be over-stated. Even with good risk management, dangers may appear in unexpected places. For example, most institutions use credit-rating agencies to assess the quality of deposit takers, but the agencies did not foresee the problems in Iceland.
A recent report by the University of Portsmouth and the accountancy firm PKF The Resilience to Fraud of the UK Higher Education Sector suggests that more work is needed in HEIs to counter potential fraud.