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.

Part of your job as a staff associate in an auditing firm is to document your findings in working papers (also known as workpapers) and schedules. Workpapers summarize your audit actions, such as planning the audit. Schedules show what steps you take to reach a conclusion. For example, to support your conclusion that cash is correctly stated on the balance sheet, you may prepare a schedule showing all bank reconciliations affirming that they reconcile without discrepancy to the balance sheet.

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.

When you are performing an audit, it’s a good idea to discuss how your client may be perpetrating fraud with your team members. Brainstorming is a very useful tool, as one member of the team may have an idea regarding client actions that you hadn’t considered, or lead you to consider some information you’ve obtained in a different way.

You can use sampling to test the strength of a client’s internal controls, but you also use sampling to test account balances. The full name for this process in auditing lingo is sampling for substantive tests of details of account balances. In non-auditing talk, this means the auditor uses sampling to see if the dollar amount on the financial statements for each account is accurate.

At every step of an audit, you have to consider risks of misstatement and their associated controls. When you are auditing assets, be sure to focus is on identifying risks in the fixed-asset management process. Generally, you look at two inherent fixed-asset risk factors: recording the correct cost basis, and working with complex (and, therefore, difficult to audit) accounting transactions.