The Auditing Practices Committee [APC] was intended to provide guidance for auditing practice, and also to set some auditing standards, in a similar way to the Accounting Standards Committee [ASC] whose constitution the APC emulated.
Official statements record the APC as being established in March 1976, as a committee of the Consultative Committee of Accountancy Bodies [CCAB], but this committee grew out of an earlier Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales [ICAEW] technical committee, which, unlike the other accountancy bodies auditing committees, disbanded on the arrival of the CCAB APC. [The CCAB APC inherited some of the ICAEW committee's working parties and the archive includes papers from this first ICAEW-governed committee]. Although a committee of the CCAB, the APC was not governed by all of the CCAB member bodies. Originally the governing bodies of the APC consisted of: the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales [ICAEW]; the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland [ICAS]; the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland [ICAI]; and the Association of Certified Accountants [ACA, later to become the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants-CACA]. The Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy [CIPFA] and the Institute of Cost and Management Accountants [ICMA, later to become the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants-CIMA] were associated bodies, entitled to send observers to APC meetings, and to comment on issues pertaining to them, but without the entitlement to vote. In 1982 CIPFA became a governing body, and in 1986 with the incorporation of CCAB Ltd., the signatures of the CCAB Board of Directors were required [in addition to the agreement of the councils of the governing bodies] for the publication of auditing standards and guidelines.
In 1991 the Auditing Practices Committee was reconstituted as the Auditing Practices Board (APB), and in 2004 the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) took over responsibility for the setting of auditing standards through the APB which became a subsidiary board of the FRC. .