Audit Planning Report For Fallow Enterprises: ASA 300 Essay.

Prepare a report for the audit senior, which addresses the 3 issues below.

1. The audit partner has suggested that the preliminary assessment of materiality for the financial report as a whole be set at $15,000. Comment on the appropriateness of this figure for your client. Provide evidence to support your view. Include a brief 
discussion of the effect that changing the preliminary assessment would have on the audit budget.

2. Prepare an analytical review (in the form of a trend analysis) using the income statement items from the trial balance. Note: Present your analysis in table format; comments on the results are not required for requirement 2.

3. Use the trend analysis to identify 3 income statement accounts that appear to be atrisk of material misstatement. Provide justification for why these accounts should be subjected to significant audit testing. In your explanations, identify an assertion that is likely to be at-risk for each account (i.e. identify 1 assertion per account; 3 in total).

4. For each account and assertion identified in requirement 3, design and describe an audit procedure that would provide relevant evidence for this (i.e. describe 1 procedure for each account; 3 procedures in total). Note: you need to explain the procedures in your own words with as much detail as possible (for example, if applicable, identify the sampling frame and specific documents required for your procedure).

Preliminary Analytical Review

Introduction

An audit planning (ASA 300) report has been prepared for one of the small companies. The trial balance of the entity has been given and based on the same the preliminary analytical review has been done. As a part of the audit procedures, the materiality level has been determined and also the common size income statement and the trend analysis has been prepared for the 2 given years to find out the major variations and find out the accounts to be audited. Fraud risk analysis has been done for the given client and the necessary audit procedures have been mentioned in the report (Marques, 2018). The report has to be handed over to the audit partner who has asked the same from audit senior.   

The trial balance of the company “Fallow Enterprises” has been shown below and the difference in the debit and credit side of the balance sheet has been assumed the suspense account, which has, not be taken in any of the computations and analysis since the nature of account is not known.

The very first step in the audit planning discusses on the materiality for the company in question. The audit partner has suggested the materiality level to be taken as $15000 but the same is very high considering the trial balance and its number for the given client. Any error, omission or misstatement is considered material, if the same in individual or in aggregate has the ability or the capability to change the economic decision of the user(DeZoort & Harrison, 2016). This has been explained in ASA 320. It helps the auditor in differentiating as to what is the extent to which the checking needs to be done and what can be ignored. There are many international and in country accounting boards which have suggested a way to determine the materiality of an entity. One of those ways is to use a certain percentage of the total assets, gross profit, total sales, net profit and shareholder’s equity. Using these percentages, the materiality has been determined to be between the ranges of $690 to $810. Using this, many of the accounts, which would have been ignored earlier, would now be under the audit scope like the depreciation account, the interest account, the furniture account and the superannuation account (Mock, et al., 2018).

2. The preliminary analytical review has been done using the trial balance of the entity and based on the same two variance and trend analysis statements have been prepared which will help in identifying the critical and significant accounts, which needs audit attention. The two statements are:
3. Common Size Income statement, and
4. Trend Analysis

Based on the statements above, several accounts have been earmarked for audit. Some of these accounts and the audit risk and assertions with respect to these accounts have been mentioned below:

4. Few of the audit procedures and the steps which needs to be taken by the auditors in this regards have been mentioned below for all the above 3 accounts:
5. Sales: The sales needs to be verified from the sales register and the auditor should go for vouching of few of the invoices for tax and other scrutiny. Also, the revenue recognition criteria of the company needs to be checked if the company is following the requisite accounting standards and the guidance notes. The change in the prices of goods, if any, should be supported by evidences and calculation(Erik & Jan, 2017).
6. Cost of Sales: The cost of sales has declined more than the drop in sales so it needs to be checked if the accounting is done properly. Again, the vouching of purchase orders and purchase invoices is required and the auditor should check the management estimates and judgements, if any, in this regards(Choy, 2018).
7. Interest Expenses: The interest expenses have declined even when the loan balance of the entity is same as compared to the last year. Therefore, it needs to be checked if the company is taking proper provision in the books and is following the accrual basis of accounting. The auditor can also look at the bank loan repayment interest and check the interest records as well(Timothy, 2004).

Conclusion and Recommendation

5. The last step, which has been mentioned in the audit planning procedure for the given entity is fraud risk analysis but the audit partner has suggested that the fraud risk analysis need not be carried out for the entity as the client, is a trustworthy one. Here, the audit partner is wrong in his contention for the reason that the auditor should always maintain the professional scepticism while auditing the accounts and should exercise his professional judgement all throughout(Fukukawa & Mock, 2011). In addition, it has been mentioned in APES 110 that the auditors should subject all the clients to fraud risk analysis irrespective of what is the situation. Here also in the given case, there have been certain cases and accounts where there can be a possibility of the fraud. Some of these accounts are interest expenses account and cost of sales account for which the reasons have already been explained above. In addition to this, the depreciation account also needs to be checked as the balances of assets is same as per last year but the expenses have gone down. Furthermore, the drop in superannuation expenses show that the employees have left the company and the current head count should be less as compared to the last year. The same should be checked and verified (Bumgarner & Vasarhelyi, 2018). 

References

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Bumgarner, N. & Vasarhelyi, M., 2018. Continuous auditing—a new view.. Continuous Auditing: Theory and Application, 20(1), pp. 7-51.

Choy, Y. K., 2018. Cost-benefit Analysis, Values, Wellbeing and Ethics: An Indigenous Worldview Analysis. Ecological Economics, p. 145.

Deegan, C. & Shelly, M., 2014. Corporate Social Responsibilities: Alternative Perspectives About the Need to Legislate. Springer, 121(1), pp. 499-526.

DeZoort, F. & Harrison, P., 2016. Understanding Auditors sense of Responsibility for detecting fraud within organization. Journal of Business Ethics, pp. 1-18.

Erik, H. & Jan, B., 2017. Supply chain management and activity-based costing: Current status and directions for the future. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 47(8), pp. 712-735.

Fukukawa, H. & Mock, T., 2011. Audit risk assessments using belief versus probability. Auditing: A Journal of Practice & Theory, 30(1), pp. 75-99.

Marques, R. P. F., 2018. Continuous Assurance and the Use of Technology for Business Compliance. Encyclopedia of Information Science and Technology, pp. 820-830.

Mock, T. J., Ragothaman, S. C. & Srivastava, R. P., 2018. Using Evidential Reasoning Technology to Enhance the Audit Quality Assurance Inspection Process. Journal of Emerging Technologies in Accounting, 15(1), pp. 29-43.

Sithole, S., Chandler, P., Abeysekera, I. & Paas, F., 2017. Benefits of guided self-management of attention on learning accounting. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(2), p. 220.

Timothy, G., 2004. Managing interest rate risk in a rising rate environment. RMA Journal, Risk Management Association (RMA), November.