Book excerpt: The AICPA Audit Committee Toolkit: Private Companies helps audit committees of private companies at all levels discover best practices for managing and incorporating their role within the organization. This toolkit takes the guesswork out of effectively establishing and managing an audit committee by furnishing you with dozens of useful tools and the most common forms for effective audit committee operation, as well as tools specially tailored for private companies. The accompanying download features forms and checklists that you can fill out and save to efficiently create, file, and track your documentation. This new second edition has been updated to include the 2013 revised COSO framework. The checklists and worksheets have been revised to make them more user-friendly. The publication has been updated with relevant regulatory changes. Additionally IFRS guidance has been added. The AICPA Audit Committee Toolkit series is the cornerstone of the Audit Committee Effectiveness Center, located at www.aicpa.org/AudCommCtr. This newly revised edition of the popular audit committee toolkit is written to help audit committees of private companies to achieve best practices for managing and incorporating their role in the organization. New to this edition of the toolkit Updated with new COSO Framework (May 2013) Improved format for forms and checklists Updated with regulatory changes Includes IFRS guidance Now with downloadable Microsoft Word tools and checklists, this Toolkit offers a broad sampling of matrices, reports, questionnaires and other pertinent materials specifically tailored to private companies and designed to make audit committee best practices actionable.