Financial statements accorded with business accounting standards will be very useful information to all the interested parties of an enterprise who are to make economic decisions intelligently. The statements with errors or incorrect accounts, however...
Financial statements accorded with business accounting standards will be very useful information to all the interested parties of an enterprise who are to make economic decisions intelligently. The statements with errors or incorrect accounts, however, may bring about information risk which will mislead the users into making improper decisions. This possibility makes an audit system necessary as a device for lessening the risk.
Roughly speaking, an audit has two functions :primary,critical function and secondary, directive function. The former, more noteworthy, is fulfilled by an auditor's judgement of financial statements for which auditor holds himself responsible. But an auditor's judgement or opinion can be aattended by audit risk, a risk an inadequate judgement or opinion, which is, in recent years, attributable to adapting audit sampling instead of a detailed audit, as a general rule.
Audit sampling causes sample risk, which consists of α risk and β risk. The former influences the effectiveness of an audit, while the latter, the efficiency of an audit. Moreover, how to control the risks has recently been a great concern of auditors. Auditors should be more attentive to controlling the latter which directly influences them in their decisions or their opinion on the audit. Besides sampling risk, audit risk has three others : inherent risk, control risk and detection risk. No risk is under the control of an auditor except detection risk, the control of which is a matter of concern now in that responsible risk should be limited to a controllable one.
Now that audit sampling prevails in modern audits, it should be noticed that the relation between auditor's opinion and audit risk is directly connected with his detection risk of β errors. An overall audit planning should be therefore based on the desired audit risk that has previously been made of a standard of acceptable audit risk or tolerable error, with all the circumstances of the company considered. As a matter of course, the result of an audit, achieved risk or projected audit error, should be compared with designed audit risk. When projected error is less than or the same as tolerable error, an unqualified opinion will be given, but when the reverse is the case, a qualified, adverse opinion or the disclaimer of opinion will be expressed.
It is, after all, desirable that an auditor should express a proper opinion through a satisfactory audit according to procedure, and should lead th company to publish financial statements credible as business accounting information and useful to all the interested parties.