If You Need Love, Get A Puppy
If You Need Love, Get A Puppy
1. PCAOB describes professional skepticism as a general duty of care that needs to be applied by the auditor throughout the duration of the audit engagement. Professional skepticism involves the auditor having a clear and questioning mind regarding the assertions that are presented by management or other client personnel. The auditor is instructed to not take the words or data presented by management as sufficient and appropriate audit evidence but rather the auditor needs to thoroughly audit the evidence with a questioning mind to achieve reasonable assurance about the persuasiveness of the evidence. Skepticism is composed of three elements; auditor attributes, mindset and actions. The PCAOB instructs the auditor to always question evidence presented by the auditor for the probability of loss, fraud or financial misstatement.
Will, the auditor, exercised professional skepticism in this case when it came to the mysterious cash ticket payments for the tickets on 11/16. Having been friends with Jessica, Will needed to exhibit a higher level of skepticism. When Jessica produced the deposit slip for the $320 ticket and asserted that the deposit slip had probably fallen in between two cabinets in the vault, Will had the opportunity of taking Jessica’s assertion as sufficient and appropriate evidence but rather decided to investigate further and noticed that the year on the bills was different than the year of the ticket and that the ink on the deposit slip was different. Will then widened the sample size to see if this was a singularity or evidence of an ongoing issue/fraud.
The two main conditions that could have affected his skepticism were his relationship with the process owner he was auditing and the materiality levels set forth for the audit. Jessica Randle, the wife of Will’s best friend, was the process owner for the area Will was currently auditing. This presents an issue in that skepticism can sometimes be influenced
1. PCAOB describes professional skepticism as a general duty of care that needs to be applied by the auditor throughout the duration of the audit engagement. Professional skepticism involves the auditor having a clear and questioning mind regarding the assertions that are presented by management or other client personnel. The auditor is instructed to not take the words or data presented by management as sufficient and appropriate audit evidence but rather the auditor needs to thoroughly audit the evidence with a questioning mind to achieve reasonable assurance about the persuasiveness of the evidence. Skepticism is composed of three elements; auditor attributes, mindset and actions. The PCAOB instructs the auditor to always question evidence presented by the auditor for the probability of loss, fraud or financial misstatement.
Will, the auditor, exercised professional skepticism in this case when it came to the mysterious cash ticket payments for the tickets on 11/16. Having been friends with Jessica, Will needed to exhibit a higher level of skepticism. When Jessica produced the deposit slip for the $320 ticket and asserted that the deposit slip had probably fallen in between two cabinets in the vault, Will had the opportunity of taking Jessica’s assertion as sufficient and appropriate evidence but rather decided to investigate further and noticed that the year on the bills was different than the year of the ticket and that the ink on the deposit slip was different. Will then widened the sample size to see if this was a singularity or evidence of an ongoing issue/fraud.
The two main conditions that could have affected his skepticism were his relationship with the process owner he was auditing and the materiality levels set forth for the audit. Jessica Randle, the wife of Will’s best friend, was the process owner for the area Will was currently auditing. This presents an issue in that skepticism can sometimes be influenced