Audit checks at enterprises are carried out in order to establish the correctness of the submission of tax reports and how correctly the accounting report is organized. Such an audit can be carried out by the tax or judicial authorities, as well as by special commercial audit organizations that perform such audits at the request of the company's management.
What is an audit
Each legal entity - a company or an enterprise - is an economic entity and a subject of taxation. Each company transfers taxes to the budget based on accounting data, but its correctness should be periodically confirmed. The tax authorities carry out such checks and, if errors are found, equate them with a tax crime - concealment, which is fraught with the most severe sanctions for an enterprise. To avoid this, business leaders themselves initiate such reviews to audit companies.
Regardless of who will check the company - tax authorities or an audit company, they themselves have the right to decide what types and number of audit procedures they will use. The auditors also independently decide whether a complete audit of financial and economic activities will be carried out or they will use the audit sampling method.
A solid test is performed when the number of elements that make up the population being tested is small, or in cases where the audit sample will be less effective.
Audit sampling method
A complete check of the financial and economic activities of a large enterprise is a rather complicated and time-consuming process. In the event that the auditor does not have clear confidence in the reliable reporting of the enterprise, as is the case if accounting is organized at a good level in some sections, and there are omissions in others, the audit sampling method is used.
The audit sample is subdivided into a representative sample - when the selection of elements is equally probable, and unrepresentative, the elements of which cannot be selected with the same probability.
Audit sampling is a sampling method of control based on the methods of mathematical statistics and on the principles of the theory of probability. This approach allows you to get a reliable result even when not all elements of one reporting item or a group of the same type of accounting entries were checked. When using this method, the auditor selects the elements according to a certain pattern and forms from them the checked set. Such a set may represent individual documents, records of operations performed, etc. The audit sampling technique is successfully used to assess the whole by its relatively small part.
