Planning: Materiality And Risk Flashcards
What is the audit process?
- Assessing client acceptance and retention decision
- Understanding the client
- Obtain evidence about controls and determining the impact on the audit
- Obtain substantive evidence about account assertions
- Wrap up the audit and make reporting decision
What is the broad 4-step audit process? (mayhew combines 1+2)
Planning, control evaluation, substantive testing, completion
What is risk?
- Exposure to chance of injury or loss. If we know it’s going to happen, it’s not a risk.
- 2 components: probability x outcome
Bottom line of risk
- we need to mitigate/ reduce/ manage risk
- we must lower the probability or the loss or both
- always a cost/benefit to managing risk (cost of quantifiable, benefit is not)
What is engagement risk?
- Risk to the auditor of serving the client
- Risk is 0 if we do not audit the client (we must have some clients)
- can lead to “bad publicity”
- Biggest part = financial failure
Other events that put the auditor at risk: financial failure, management integrity failure, materially misstated financial statements, questionable client practices (AIG)
What is enterprise risk? (business risk)
- the risk a client company will suffer a significant loss
- derives from client’s operations and the potential outcomes of organization activities
How can a client manage enterprise risk?
Enterprise risk management system: identifies risks, enacts controls to address risks where possible, and provides information, communication, and monitoring for management and the corporate governance circle.
What is financial reporting risk?
- relates to client
- the risk the financial statements do not comply with GAAP
- affected by :
- company’s financial health
- quality of internal controls
- complexity of company’s transactions and financial reporting
- management’s motivation to misstate the financial statements (short term incentives are sketchy)
Which risk do auditors struggle most with?
Business risk
What is audit risk?
- The risk we give the wrong opinion, an unqualified opinion on materially misstated financial statements (subset of engagement risk)
- it is within the auditor’s control
- doesn’t typically go the other way
- related to financial reporting risk (fin reporting risk should be lower after an audit, how much lower depends on audit risk level set by the auditor)
- if fin reporting risk is 0, audit risk is 0
- that never happens, but lower FRR means lower AR
What is materiality?
- The level of misstatement which under the circumstances makes it probable that a reasonable person’s judgment would’ve changed.
- super complicated and circumstantial
- were not looking for perfection
- hard to develop a pure quantitative measure
- affects audit risk
What could affect materiality assessment? (qualitative)
Would correcting the error enable the company to…
- beat analysts expectations
- beat last year’s earnings
- report income instead of loss
- avoid debt covenants
What is overall materiality?
What we think will probably affect users
Planning materiality - tolerable misstatement
< overall materiality
- applied to account balances for testing purposes
What is posting materiality?
- minimum cut-off for tracking of misstatements by the auditor
- auditor lists misstatements above this amount during the audit
- evaluates in aggregate at end of audit