The auditor’s goal is to become aware of and accurately determine the risks of a material misstatement by providing a basis for designing and enforcing responses to the risks of material misstatement.
It is important to refer to the traditional audit risk model to remain important to the audit process. The audit risk model identifies the following three types of audit risk components:
Inherent Risk
Inherent risk is the susceptibility of an assertion about a category of transaction, account balance, or disclosure to a misstatement that would be material, either individually or when aggregated with other misstatements, before considering any related controls.
Inherent risk is considered higher where a high degree of judgment and estimation is involved or where transactions of the entity are highly complex.
Control Risk
Control risk is the risk of a misstatement that could occur in an assertion about a class of transaction, account balance, or disclosure.
The misstatement will be material, either individually or when aggregated with other misstatements. It will no longer be prevented or detected and corrected on a timely basis, employing the entity’s internal control.
When the audited entity does not have adequate internal controls to prevent and detect instances of fraud and error in the financial statements, control is considered to be high.
Detection Risk
Detection risk is the risk that the procedures performed by the auditor to reduce audit risk to a low degree won’t find a misstatement that exists, which may be material, either individually or in aggregate.
Auditors will reduce detection risk by increasing the amount of sampled transactions for detailed testing.
The following terms have the meanings attributed below for ISAs:
Assertions – Representations by management, explicit or otherwise, are embodied inside the financial statements, as used by the auditor not to forget the possibility of different forms of misstatements that may occur.
Business risk – A risk resulting from significant conditions, events, circumstances, or actions that could adversely influence an entity’s potential to gain its targets and execute its strategies.
Internal control – The procedure designed, applied, and maintained by using those charged with governance, management, and other employees to provide reasonable assurance about the achievement of an entity’s goals concerning the reliability of financial reporting, effectiveness, and performance of operations, and compliance with relevant laws and regulations.
Risk assessment procedures – The audit techniques are done to understand the entity and its environment, such as the entity’s internal control, to become aware of and identify the risks of material misstatement at the financial statement and assertion levels, whether due to fraud or error.
Significant threat – An identified and assessed risk of material misstatement that requires special audit consideration in the auditor’s judgment.
Here are some tips to follow while identifying audit risk:
- To plan the audit, you need to pick out your client’s precise risks. To become aware of the risks, you’ll want to gain an understanding of the entity, which means asking a lot of questions. If you want clarification on something, don’t be shy — ask questions.
- In gaining an understanding of the entity, it’s necessary that you just grasp their business. It’s additionally necessary that you just get a better understanding of your client’s important accounts and group action cycles. The intention here is simple: the more you acknowledge your client, the additional you’ll be able to determine their risks.
- All entities have controls. If you have a customer in which the owner reviews financial results, communicates the importance of quality, or sets a strong “tone on the top” via demonstrating integrity, your client has control. When in search of to discover your client’s controls, the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) elements and principles can help you detect feasible gaps.
- On each audit, you are required to assess the layout of controls applicable to the audit and decide whether those controls were implemented. This isn’t the identical element to trying out the working effectiveness of controls.
To provide a basis for designing and performing further audit procedures, the auditor must identify the risk of material misstatements following these steps:
- Identify risk throughout the process of understanding the entity and its environment.
- Assess the identified risk and evaluate its impact on the financial statements.
- Relate the identified risk at the assertion level considering the controls to be tested.
- Consider the possibility of misstatements and their effect on the financial statements.
