Review Engagement (Limited Assurance): Definition and Example

The Review Engagement or Limited Assurance:

The review engagement or limited assurance is sometimes called negative assurance. This type of engagement is different from a reasonable assurance engagement. In other words, it is different from the audit.

Normally, in this engagement, the auditor performs fewer procedures and reviews to support a conclusion on the financial statements in terms of whether anything has come to the auditor’s attention to indicate that the financial statements are not prepared in accordance with the specific accounting standard.

Review engagement provides a level of limited assurance to the users of financial statements as the result the procedure that auditors use to review the financial statements are much less than an audit.

In normal cases, the audit opinion given to this kind of negative assurance engagement is a negative opinion, for example, nothing comes to their attention that the financial statements that they review are not true and fair.

However, if the Review engagement could not obtain sufficient supporting documents to support their opinion, the audit should express the qualified option or disclaimers.

Example:

The best example of review engagement would be the engagement between external audit forms to review the client’s financial statements for the purpose of submitting the financial statements (mostly interim financial statements) to the security exchange regulator.

In normal cases, with this kind of engagement, the audit will perform fewer procedures than the audit, and the assurance that they provided to those financial statements is also limited.

If the auditor found no material misstatement, the auditor will at the end of its engagement issue the opinion to the financial statements that nothing comes to their attention and that financial statements are not prepared and presented true and fair in all material respect.

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Another example of review engagement will be agreed-upon procedures. Normally, agree-upon procedures engagement happens when the client wants the auditor to do or examine certain areas of financial statements based on procedures set by them.