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Anne Aylor Case - 1 Essay

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Accounting 732
Audit II
9/25/2012
Anne Aylor Inc.

A. Why are different materiality bases considered when determining planning materiality?

Different materiality bases are considered when determining planning materiality because the magnitude and nature of financial statement misstatements or omissions have different influences on different financial statement users. For example, investors are more interested in the accuracy of numbers involving net income because they are mainly concerned with the company’s ability to increase shareholder wealth. For an audit company, the primary concern when planning materiality is to take into account all expected financial statement users. These different expected users all have different …show more content…

The risk of management fraud needs to be considered when determining tolerable misstatement because the risk of fraud directly affects the risk of misstatement. Smith & Jones has a percentage that tolerable misstatement thresholds should not exceed, which is adjusted tolerable misstatement guidelines, with low risk of management fraud misstatements should balance each other out. However, when high risk of management fraud is likely misstatements will likely skew the company’s numbers to overstate the company’s income (ex. overstating income and understating expenses). If numbers are fraudulently misstated with the goal of increasing income, the chance of highly material misstatements drastically increases.

E. Why does the auditor not use the same tolerable misstatement or percentage of account balance for all financial statement accounts?

If an auditor were to have the same tolerable misstatement for each account the cost of the audit would be extremely high due to the large amount of testing that would need to be conducted. Certain accounts will be given a high threshold, therefore requiring less evidence gathering. Accounts that need more evidence require a lower tolerable misstatement. By setting low and high tolerable misstatements the auditor will save money and time. For example, Smith & Jones when testing the total asset account for tolerable

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