The ICAEW said it was working with the Bank of England's supervisory arm, the Prudential Regulation Authority, on whether confidence in capital ratios, a core benchmark of health, would be increased if they were formally audited.
"ICAEW is considering whether and how external assurance could increase confidence in bank capital ratios," Iain Coke, head of the ICAEW's financial services faculty, said in a statement.
"We are working closely with the Prudential Regulation Authority on this project. We are currently taking wider stakeholder input and aim to publish proposals for consultation in the second quarter," Coke said.
Such a step would go further than new global rules published this week from the Basel Committee of banking supervisors that set out stricter requirements on how lenders must publicly disclose their capital ratios from the end of 2016.
The Basel rules require a senior manager at the bank to attest in writing that the disclosures have been compiled with board approved internal controls.
Coke said the Basel rules coupled with a separate UK reform for vetting senior bankers with its 'guilty until proven innocent' presumption, could see bankers asking for external auditing of ratios to give them additional assurance.
Regulators suspect banks of manipulating internal models used for calculating capital requirements after finding big variations in the amount of capital held to cover the same risks.
The BoE is already looking at whether banks who use internal models should also publish ratios calculated under a globally agreed "standardised" approach for measuring risks in order to give investors an additional check.
Confidence in capital ratios is becoming more critical as banks build a new cushion of debt that can be turned into equity if core capital ratios fall to a certain level.
Basel is also consulting on whether banks must hold a minimum amount of capital irrespective of what internal models say they should be holding.
(Reporting by Huw Jones; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)
By Huw Jones
