Articles & Books From Audits

Article / Updated 09-15-2022
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.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-18-2022
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.
Cheat Sheet / Updated 02-09-2022
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.
Article / Updated 05-13-2016
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.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
In response to a loss of confidence among American investors reminiscent of the Great Depression, President George W. Bush signed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act into law on July 30, 2002. SOX, as the law was quickly dubbed, is intended to ensure the reliability of publicly reported financial information and bolster confidence in U.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Fraud, embezzlement, and misappropriation can occur in every size of business. Such illegal accounting practices require manipulation of a business’s accounts. Keep your eyes open for these kinds of illegal accounting practices in your small business: Sales skimming: Not recording all sales revenue, to deflate the taxable income of the business and its owner.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Audits provide the opportunity for a second set of eyes (usually those of a certified professional accountant) looking over your business’s accounts. An annual audit of your business may be a requirement of your business's investors and lenders as a condition of putting their money in the business. CPA auditors provide a couple of useful services for your business: Checking up: In a sense, CPA auditors give your business a yearly physical exam.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Your business's financial statement audit report can give your business a clean bill of health, or the auditor's report may state that your financial statements are misleading and should not be relied upon: The clean (unqualified) opinion: If the auditor finds no serious problems, the CPA firm gives your business’s financial statements an unqualified or clean opinion, which it expresses in a three-paragraph report.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
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.
Article / Updated 03-26-2016
Audit evidence consists of the documents you use during an audit to substantiate your audit opinion. While working on an audit, you encounter many different types of evidence (written, oral, and so on). Documents can be prepared by employees of the client or by outside parties. To properly evaluate the strength of evidence you gather, you have to understand the four concepts of evidence: Nature: The form of the evidence — for example, oral, visual, or written.