Posted: February 9th, 2015

Auditing

Paper, Order, or Assignment Requirements

Question Scenario

At a recent meeting of a company’s sales team, the subject of ‘auditors’ was discussed. This followed grumblings from the Sales Manager about the fact that he’d had to spend several hours discussing the company’s sales pricing strategy and specific customer profiles, with the external auditors.

One of the junior sales executives commented:

“I don’t understand what drives the auditors to spend so much time and resources on   the audit. They should have more belief in the financial statements that our financial director has prepared and the board has approved – after all they know that the Board is acting in the best interests of the company. If there’s anything in the financial statements that the auditors aren’t sure about they should talk it over with the directors and they can give them the assurance they require.   We all know that the auditors have to collect evidence to support their findings, but it seems that the amount of evidence they collect in specific areas of the financial   statements bear little resemblance to the amount of importance our directors place on those areas. This cannot be right!

Further, as to the matter of the ‘assertions’ that directors apparently make, surely this is just technical nonsense – they’re the ones making the assertions not the directors that’s what they’re paid for. I think that we’d all benefit more if the auditors spent more time on advising us as to how, in their opinion, our company could be more effective and so improve profitability. Our company would probably also get a great deal more benefit and value for money if we replaced the external auditors with our own internal audit department – and I   simply do not understand why it hasn’t done so”.

Required

Critically evaluate the comments made by the junior sales executive.

Maximum word counts 2, 500 (+ 10 % tolerance)

Sub divides the scenario into sections – so that you can structure your comments and focus on specific aspects.