Annals of the University of Oradea: Economic Science (Jul 2015)
CURRENT CONCEPTS ON SELECTION TECHNIQEUS IN FINANCIAL AUDITING
Abstract
The financial auditor's work evolves around the issue of an independent, professional and objective opinion on the compliance of the client's financial statements with the national accounting rules and principles. At the same time, the auditor will have to express an opinion on the ability of the company to continue its activity. An ideal situation would involve auditing all the components of the yearly accounts, but this would take time, effort and a very high cost. Fortunately, the audit team has some very useful tools for acquiring audit evidence in a fast and conclusive way - selection techniques. These techniques may be used in different phases of the audit and auditors have been using them for a long time, in fact no audit program would function without these techniques. They have become quite common as the auditors make important judgments, such as determining what type of technique to apply, whether to use statistical or nonstatistical techniques, appropriate inputs to determine sample size, and evaluation of results, particularly when errors are detected. This paper aims to theoretically present the main selection techniques, indicating how, why and when to use them. There are six selection techniques and we deal with the most frequent four of them. Our purpose is to present the characteristics and set the limits of these techniques, emphasizing sampling as the most common selection technique currently in use. A commonly held misconception about statistical sampling, for example, is that it removes the need for the use of the professional judgement. While it is true that statistical sampling uses statistical methods to determine the sample size and to select and evaluate audit samples, it is the responsibility of the auditor to consider and specify in advance factors such as materiality, the expected error rate or amount, the risk of over-reliance or the risk of incorrect acceptance, audit risk, inherent risk, control risk, standard deviation and population size, before the sample size can be determined. Selection techniques allow an auditor’s judgement to be concentrated on those areas of the audit where it is most needed. It allows the quantification of key factors and the risk of errors. This is not to suggest that selection techniques remove the need for professional judgement, but rather that they allow elements of the evaluation process to be quantified, measured and controlled.
