Financial Audit: Types of audits and the role of the auditor to verify that financial statements meet the audit requirements.
Read below about the financial audit types and the role of the auditor to verify that financial statements meet the audit requirements.
These criteria generally conform to international accounting standards. Auditors may audit financial statements that have been prepared on a cash basis, or any other accounting basis appropriate to the organization.
To determine if financial statements have been accurately reported according to accounting standards, the auditor gathers evidence.
LEARN MORE ABOUT THE THREE FINANCIAL AUDIT TYPES.
Financial Audit Types: Process Audit
This audit ensures that processes are operating within established limits. This audit assesses the operation against established standards to determine compliance and effectiveness.
A process audit could be:
- Verify that your equipment meets the requirements.
- Analyse the inputs and outputs (equipment, materials, people), environment, methods (procedures, instructions) used, and the measures taken to measure performance.
- It is important to verify that process controls are effective and adequate as set out in procedures, work instructions, flowcharts, and training.
Financial Audit Types: Product Audit
This is one of the three financial audit types that has a more business perspective and checks a product or service for compliance with customer specifications.
Financial Audit Types: System Audit
A system audit is an important part of the financial audit types, auditing how a management system was done. Audits are documented activities that verify, through a thorough examination, and evaluation, the effectiveness, and suitability of management systems. They also verify that they are in compliance with specified requirements.
- To evaluate an existing program’s compliance with company policies and contractual obligations, or regulatory requirements, a quality audit is conducted.
- An audit of an environmental system examines the environmental management system. An audit of the food safety system examines food safety management systems. Safety system audits examine the safety management system.
What are the audit parties?
First-party
A first-party audit is an organization’s assessment of its strengths and weaknesses relative to its procedures, methods and/or any external standards that have been adopted. A company’s internal auditor, who has no vested interest in the audit results.
Second party
A customer performs an external audit of a supplier on behalf of a client, or by a contracting organization. The contract has been signed, and the goods or services are or will be delivered. Contract law must govern second-party audits as they are required to provide contractual guidance from the customer. Audit results can have a significant impact on the customer’s purchase decision. Second-party audits must be more formal than first-party.
Third party
An independent audit organization performs a third party audit. It is independent of any conflict of interest. An independent third-party audit can only be done if there is no customer-supplier relationship. An audit by a third party may result in certification, registration, recognition, an award, licensure approval or licensure approval, a violation, or a penalty for the interested party.
Performance audits vs. compliance and conformance.
Besides the financial audit types, it is important to know how audit goes beyond compliance and conformance. These audits are also known as management audits, value-added audits, and added value auditing. These audits aim to evaluate organizational performance. Audits that are used to assess compliance or conformance don’t focus on a poor or good performance. Performance is a major concern for most organizations.
There is a key difference between improvement audits and conformance audits.
They collect evidence about an organization’s performance, but no evidence that it conforms to a standard. If an organization doesn’t follow its ordering procedures, management may be concerned. If an order is modified more than once it could indicate that there are issues and need to be corrected.
Following up audits.
An audit of a product or process can reveal problems that need to correct. Corrective actions may also be required. Most corrective actions cannot be taken during an audit. The audit manager might need to conduct a follow-up audit to verify that corrective actions were taken and that corrections have been made. It is expensive to conduct a single-purpose follow-up audit so it is often combined with the next area audit.
The importance of the finding should be considered along with the potential audit risk.
An organization may also conduct a follow-up audit to verify that corrective actions have been taken to address performance issues. Sometimes organizations will forward performance concerns to management for further investigation.
Four phases of an audit process.
- Audit preparation and planning: This includes all the work that must be done in advance by all parties (e.g. The audit team includes the lead auditor, auditor, client and auditor program manager. This is to ensure that the audit meets client objectives. This stage starts when the audit is approved and ends when it ends.
- Execution: Also known as fieldwork. This is the data-gathering part of an audit. This includes the time between the time the auditor arrives at the site and the meeting. It includes meeting with the auditory to understand the process, system controls and verify their effectiveness. Also, communication between the auditee and team members.
- Audit reporting: This document communicates the findings from the investigation. To aid management in solving organizational problems, the audit report should contain clear and precise data. After the audit report is issued by the lead auditor or any follow-up actions are completed, the audit process can be concluded.
- Audit Follow-up and Closure: ISO 19011 clause 6.6 states that an audit is completed when all planned audit activities have been carried out or agreed to with audit clients. The ISO 19011 clause 6.7 continues to say that follow-up actions can be verified as part of a subsequent inspection.
for the financial audit types REQUESTS TO CORRECT AUDITS NON-CONFORMITIES/FINDINGS WITHIN AUDITS are very common.
Corrective action refers to a procedure taken to fix a problem, defect, or nonconformity to prevent it from happening again. Corrective action is not a series of steps to fix problems, and it’s about eliminating the root cause.
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