Financial statement fraud, commonly referred to as "cooking the books," involves deliberately overstating assets, revenues, and profits and/or understating liabilities, expenses, and losses. When a forensic accountant investigates business financial fraud, she looks for red flags or accounting warning signs that indicate suspect business accounting practices.

Enacted in the wake of corporate mismanagement and accounting scandals, Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) offers guidelines and spells out regulations that publicly traded companies must adhere to. Sarbanes-Oxley guidelines offer best-practice principles for any company, especially those providing services to other businesses bound by SOX.

Auditing is the process of investigating information that’s prepared by someone else — such as a company’s financial statements — to determine whether the information is fairly stated and free of material misstatement.Having a certified public accountant (CPA) perform an audit is a requirement of doing business for many companies because of regulatory- or compliance-related matters.

Every profession has its own lexicon. To communicate with your audit peers and supervisors, you must know key auditing phrases. Knowing these buzzwords is also helpful if you’re a business owner, because auditors sometimes forget to switch from audit-geek talk to regular language when speaking with you. Audit evidence: Facts gathered during the audit procedures that provide a reasonable basis for forming an opinion regarding the financial statements under audit.

The goal of a financial statement audit is for you (the auditor) to form an opinion regarding whether those statements are or aren’t free from error. To do so, you use your best professional judgment when assessing your client’s information and assertions. Although every company is different, and each audit you work on will vary, you can follow some common procedures.

The generally accepted auditing standards (GAAS) are the standards you use for auditing private companies. GAAS come in three categories: general standards, standards of fieldwork, and standards of reporting. Keep in mind that the GAAS are the minimum standards you use for auditing private companies. Additionally, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) has adopted these standards for public (traded on the open market) companies.

While you work on your client’s audit, you gather sufficient appropriate evidence to come to a determination on whatever it is you’re auditing. The methods you use to gather audit evidence aren’t one-size-fits-all. Part of your obligation to exercise due professional care is to select the most appropriate method(s) for the type of client and auditing task at hand.

When you audit a company, your main goal is to provide assurance to the users of the company’s financial statements that those documents are free of material misstatement. You use the audit risk model, which consists of inherent, control, and detection risk, to help you determine your auditing procedures for accounts or transactions shown on your client’s financial statements.

Audit evidence documents give you the substantiation for your professional audit opinion. When performing an audit, you must assess the nature, competence, sufficiency, and evaluation of the audit evidence to determine its accuracy. After all your audit depends on the veracity of the evidence. The nature of the audit evidence The nature of audit evidence refers to the form of the evidence you’re looking at during the audit.