Auditing

Posted: October 17th, 2013

Auditing

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Auditing

16-18

The first objective of obtaining a bank confirmation from the banks that the client does business with is to auditing with obtaining of guarantee that the financial report is completely free of any errors or misstatements that might affect the opinion of the auditor. Additionally, it helps in obtaining enough evidence meant for reducing risks as much as possible to make it possible to draw conclusion from the information.

The objectives of comparing bank reconciliation balance with the confirmation balance include tracing book balances from the client’s bank reconciliation to check for accuracy. The other objective is testing the accuracy of the reconciliation mathematically. It helps in tracing of the balances to the bank statements and finally testing the reconciliation items to reconciliation from the bank.

The purpose or objective of comparing cheques returned along with cut-off bank statement to cheques in the bank reconciliation is  help the auditor in verifying most of the reconciliation items at the end of year bank reconciliation such as the outstanding cheques, bank charges and deposits in transit. Additionally, listing the cheque number, payee and amounts of all material cheques not returned with cut-off statement helps in the inspection of erasures or any alterations to verify the clerical precision of the totals presented in the statement. It also aims at footing of the paid cheques as well as the deposits that support the bank statement for comparison of totals to the corresponding ones in the bank statement.

The objective of reviewing the board of directors meetings is to find out the policies of the company concerning investment policies as well as risk assessments. It helps in assessing the major investment and adjustments changes in the policies, reviewing of marketable securities and analyzing the risks involved and acknowledging the internal audits.

A four-column proof of cash is prepared by the auditor with a main objective of reconciling the bank’s records of the client’s starting balance, cleared checks, cash deposits and the final balance for the period. The cash proof helps in verifying these statements. On the other hand, comparison of bank cancellation dates with dates on the cancelled cheques helps in verifying whether this was reflected in the statements in order to avoid any misstatements and helps in identifying kiting. Additionally, tracing of deposits in transit to the cut-off statement and current year cash receipts aims at verifying the outstanding cheques to verify all cheques are cleared in the bank. This is important for identifying kiting as well.

18-19

            Examining supporting documents for cash disbursement involves documentation evidence. Examination of the acquisition and payment journal for large unusual transactions involves documentation evidence. Tracing general ledges to determine accounts payable and related assets uses document-tracing evidence. Determining the exchange rates payable I foreign currency involves analytical evidence. Obtaining of statements from vendors and reconciling them to accounts payable involves confirmation evidence. Obtaining statements from vendors directly involves confirmation evidence but this time from external source. Obtaining accounts payable from trial balance and adding the data file again involves reperformance evidence.

It is quite important that some auditing objectives are satisfied using different procedures. Each procedure aims at satisfying a certain objective. Therefore, using different procedures is quite important since one procedure may fail to satisfy the objective of the comprehensively.