Paul Dietz, CEO of the St. Joseph Medical Center, a two-hundred-bed hospital in northwest Indiana, has approached you, a partner in Dirksen & Co., a public accounting firm. The Medical Center's board of directors has approved a strategy to market arthroscopic surgery in alliance with Hankin Orthopedic Surgery and Sports Medicine, a group of sports medicine doctors in Gary, Indiana. Management plans a print and radio advertising campaign to compete with two major suppliers of arthroscopic surgery in the Chicago area: Northwestern Medical Facility and the University of Chicago Hospitals. Although known in medical circles for pioneering research and state-of-theart surgical procedures, the Hankin Group is not well known by the general public.

Paul Dietz proposes to you that an independent panel of American Medical Association members, drawn from the editorial boards of leading research journals, be commissioned by the Medical Center to design measures of quality for arthroscopic surgery from which Dirksen & Co. would measure the Hankin Group's quality. Dirksen & Co.

would be asked to compile "scores" using the independent panel's measures of quality, and would be identified as "a public accounting firm" in print and radio ads. In discussing the proposed assurance service with your partners, one asks, "What standards would you propose we apply on this engagement?"

Required:

1. Is the proposed service an assurance service other than an attestation?

2. In advising the Medical Center, do you see a problem with the assurance service as proposed by Dietz?

3. Respond to your partner's question: What standards would you propose to apply?