Audit and Quality Issues - Intellectual Capital Reporting and ISO 9001

Purpose - Organizations are competing on intangible resources. In order to support management processes, some organizations are establishing methodologies to evaluate their Intellectual Capital. Since the beginning of the millennium, various approaches were suggested and some of them supported with large public funds to get promoted and implemented. In order to raise awareness, some institutions offer to audit Intellectual Capital Reports. This article compares experiences of evaluating the performance of IC Management in different contexts of specialization and identifies strengths and weaknesses of audits as a means to improve legitimacy for ICR. Additionally, this article covers the challenge of how to address the new requirements of the quality management guideline in ISO 9001 in Intellectual Capital Reporting and Management. Design/methodology/approach - Because of the inherent strategic importance of Intellectual Capital Reports, public availability of documents is low. Hence, an alternative, action-research-oriented approach is chosen, even though this might result in some limitations of generality or bias. Building on literature (Mertins, 2008; Wang 2012) as well as vast practical experience from teaching and consulting projects, the authors reviewed recent developments in auditing ICRs as a means to increase legitimacy. This article focuses on case anecdotic evidence lessons learned on auditing Intellectual Capital reports and relates the finding to the suggestions of the to be released new guideline for ISO 9001. Originality/value - Four years after establishing audit guidelines for Intellectual Capital Reports, a review of initial experiences seems to be quite interesting for the science community. This article focuses on empirical experiences based on narratives from case studies and reflects on quality and audit issues with special emphasis on "Intellectual Capital Reporting - made in Germany". Practical implications - The discussion on reporting on intangibles gained popularity with the initiatives of "global reporting" as well as "integrated reporting" or quality management in general. Audits or "testimonies" on Intellectual Capital Reports in a general interpretation therefore will find a growing market for various reasons. Additionally, the new requirements for quality management in ISO 9001 address these challenges of managing intangibles and thus will have an impact on almost all part of the business community. This paper concludes with some recommendations to be as well as requirements for audits on ICS as a challenge for further research.