Auditing Essay

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3. Under what circumstances is an inventory rollback typically performed? How valid is the evidence yielded by this audit procedure? Explain. An inventory rollback is typically performed when the inventory audit occurs after the year-end date. The rollback procedures will remove the effects of inventory transactions, such as purchases and cost of goods sold, to obtain a correct balance of inventory at the year-end date. The outcome yielded by this audit procedure is reliable enough to validate the inventory balance recorded on the client’s book. If the value obtained after the rollback procedures differ from the inventory balance recorded on the client’s books, the auditors can immediately see a discrepancy and apply all other substantive procedures to reason out the mismatch. 4. Jill Karnick abandoned her attempt to complete an inventory roll forward because of the considerable amount of work the procedure involved. Do you believe she made an appropriate decision given the circumstances she faced? How should auditors weigh the cost of an audit procedure, in terms of time and other resources, against the quantity and quality of evidence that it yields? Jill Karnick should have performed an inventory roll forward given the several red flags HMI carried during the audit period. The red flags included the SEC’s inquiry regarding HMI’s allowance for doubtful accounts, the premature press release reporting the company’s 1995 earnings, the anonymous letter that BDO Seidman received, and the suspicious in-transit inventory at year-end. All those incidents together are very suspicious and can possibly put a material effect to the financial statement, so Jill Karnick should perform all necessary substantive procedures to validate the inventory account balance. According to AU Section 312A.1, “Audit risk and materiality […] need to be considered together in determining

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