Essay: Assurance Compliance Analytical Process - Importance And Risks.

Discuss About The Assurance Compliance Analytical Process?

Application of Analytical Process: In the process of developing the audit plan of DIPL, analytical process of the financial information provides a significant assistance. On the other hand, audit plan provides the necessary guidelines and directions to the auditors at the time of audit operations. On a more precise note, audit plan helps the auditors to maintain the audit cost in a certain limit and to stop misunderstanding with the audit clients. Analytical approach of the financial information of DIPL refers to the process of spreading the financial information from different financial declaration of the company. The process to evaluate the financial information of the companies can be done with the help of various mechanisms. With the help of the use of analytical approach in order to analyze the financial information, all the accounts and financial analysts of the companies can use this information in order to take various accounting and financial decisions. Common sizing analytical approach helps in the process of analyzing the financial declaration of the companies from common reference points. One of the major advantages of this is that it provides assistance to compare the financial reports from different financial timelines (Titera 2013).

Accountants and financial analysts can use various item lines from the financial statements and the also can check their base of preparation for the companies. For example, the registration process of various accenting and financial items in the financial reports like assets, net liabilities, owner’s equity and others can be take into consideration along with examination of digression of them from the normal situation. One of the major anal cal process of financial information is Benchmarking and this process can be used for the analysis of company’s audit plan. With the help of benchmarking process, variance in the financial reports of the companies can be spotted and the actual causes of the occurrence of these variances can be determined with the determination of root cause of these variances. Apart from the benchmarking process, Ratio Analysis is considered as a major analytical process of financial information of the companies. Ration analysis is especially helpful in the comparison of the financial reports of two or many companies in order to develop the audit plan (Jans et al. 2014).

Explanation: The adopted analytical approaches of the companies to analyze the financial information has significant influence on the development of audit planning process and this is necessary for spreading the financial information among the various departments of the companies. For example, as an outcome of the Current Ratio analysis of DIPL, it can be seen that in the financial year 2013, 2014 and 2015, the current ration of the company are 1.42, 1.46 and 1.5 respectively. As another example, Profit Margin can be taken into consideration as a part of profitability of the company. From this profitability analysis, it can be seen that in the year 2013, 2014 and 2015, profit margin of DIPL were 0.068, 0.60 and 0.06 respectively. This analysis of profitability helps to reveal the amount of net income earned against the amount of net sales of DIPL. In addition, this analysis of profitability provides the accountants and financial analysts with the view that whether the expenses of the company are low or high. Apart from this, it also helps the accountants and financial analysts to understand the effectiveness of the company’s budget along with the requirement for company’s expansion. The analysis of rations is a major tool for the auditors of DIPL.

Explanation

The favorable and unfavorable changes in the financial and performance rations of DIPL help the auditors to develop the understanding about the current financial health of the company.  In this regard, the example of the solvency ratio analysis can be taken into consideration. As per the analysis of solvency ratios of DIPL, in the year 2013, 2014 and 2015, the solvency ratio of the DIPL was 0.62, 0.44 and 0.21 respectively. This analysis is helpful for underrating the desirable or undesirable trend of the company’s performance in the recent years. The comparison of rations have its significance in determining that whether the current cash flow of the company is good enough to meet the short term and long term obligations of DIPL or not. On a more precise note, it can be said that the analysis and comparison of financial and performance ratios helps the accountants and financial analysis to determine the relative financial position of the organization over the three years. It helps to determine whether the current financial position of the company is desirable or undesirable. In case of undesirable financial position of DIPL, the management of the company needs to take corrective measures to revive the financial condition of the company. For all these reason, analytical process of financial information has significant importance (Knechel and Salterio 2016).

Risk Factors: There are some major risk factors that can be raised from the business operations of DIPL. According to the case study, it can be see that the accounts or management of the company has omitted numerous business transactions of DIPL. This process has a direct link with the inconsistencies in the planning of various marketing and sales activities of the company. According to the analysis of various financial statements and reports of DIPL, it can be seen that the company has failed to achieve the targeted profit level from sales revenue. The main reason is the incontinency and ineffectiveness of the company’s management in the business operations. Thus, it can be seen that the company has failed to measure the impact of various micro and macro economic factors that have effects on the business operations of DIPL like economic, political and social factors. Thus, it can be said that the poor revenue and profit margin of the company lead to the inherent risks (Hayes, Wallage and Gortemaker 2014).

In addition, the employees of DIPL have rapidly increased the amount of this inherent risk. The level of inherent risks of the company’s increases due to the lack of experienced proficiency and professionalism of the employees as the success of the businesses vastly depend on their employee’s performance. As the inexperienced and inefficient workforce of DIPL is bound to make mistakes, the inherent risks will be increased. According to the case study of DIPL, complexities can be seen in the process of succession of CEO of the company. As a result, this process leads to the increase in inherent risks in the organization. Major inherent risks can be seen in the ineffective process of selecting the succession of CEO of the company. Apart from this, it can be seen that DIPL do not have enough number of employees for the handling of their business operations. This reason also leads to the increase in inherent risks in the business operations of DIPL. Thus, from the above discussion, it can be seen that these are the major reason of the increase in inherent risks in DIPL’s business operations (Nalewaik and Mills 2016).

Risk Factors

Explanation: It can be seen that there is excessive workload on the employees of the company. This excessive workload leads to the poor bookkeeping of the company and this issue leads to various cash flow issues, ineffective operating outcome, ineffective liquidity and solvency position of the company and others. Apart from this, risk of error can be seen in the financial statements due to the lack of proper interpretation. In this regard, the management of DIPL has a significant role to play. It has been seen that the management of DIPL lacks integrity and accountability and for this reason, they are suffering from the concern of loosing reputation in the business community. High incentive structure for management creates excessive pressure on the management and it leads to material misstatements in the financial statements and reports (William Jr, Glover and Prawitt 2016).

[A] Identification and Explanation of Two Fraud Risks: In the business organizations, fraud risks can be considered as one of the major risks for the business organizations. Due to the occurrence of fraud risks, the business organizations use to loss major amount of business assets. In many of the time in the organizations, major dissatisfactions can be seen among the workforce and these dissatisfactions often force them to involve in different kinds of frauds in the organizations. Another major reason of fraud is the expectations of different investors of the organizations. The promise made by the management of the companies to attain a certain financial performance often contributes to high level of fraud (Arens et al. 2016).

In case of the business operations of DIPL, the major risk that can be happened from the business operations includes the engagement of the workers in different kinds of fraudulent. This can be happened as a result of dissatisfaction of the employees. According to the provided case study of DIPL, it can be seen that there is a tremendous pressure from the end of the board of the company for the adoption of a new accounting system. The adoption of this new accounting system creates a huge pressure on the workforce of the company and this pressure light contributes to fraud. Thus, it can be said that in order to cope up with the pressure of reconciliation, the employees many take the way of fraud activities and they may handle the whole procedure in a wrong manner that leads to material misstatements. From this particular case study, it can also be seen that the process of ineffective handling of the new information technology implementation leads to improper treatment of some major accounting and financial transactions at the end of the year. This whole process may lead to the loss of financial information and material misstatements (Beasley 2015).

Identification and Explanation of Two Fraud Risks

Apart from this, another major fraud risk is the fraud in the process of financial reporting. High risk of ineffective financial announcements can be seen in case excessive financial expectations can be seen from various stakeholders for the declaration of financial announcements, in case the announcement from the company’s management to meet certain specific performance target and in case certain target of the goals for the acquisition of certain debts. According to the financial statements of DIPL, it can be seen that there is an increase of revenue of the company from the year 2013 to 2015. Apart from this, there is also increase in the gross profit and net profit of the company. Escalation can be seen in the current assets and total assets of the company. From the case study, it can be seen that DIPL acquitted a loan of 7.5 million from BDO finance in the financial year 2015. From the case study, it can also be seen that as per the loan agreement, DIPL needed to maintain a current ratio of around 1.5 and a debt-equity ratio that is lower than 1. The need of this specific requirement might be to create pressure on the company to repay the loan on as per the agreed timeline. These requirements can lead to fraudulent as DIPL may manipulate the financial reports for false reflection of financial position of the company. In case DIPL fails to maintain the required benchmark, the company will become ineligible to acquire loan from BDO Finance (Cannon and Bedard 2016).

[B] Explanation: As per the provided case study, it can be observed that the valuation process of the raw materials of the business on the basis of average cost is not the effective and suitable as the current cost of the paper was more than that of the average cost. The major risk in the identification of fraudulent activities of the employees for the implementation of new information technology system can be identified by monitoring the activities in different phrases of jobs. Apart from this risk, the risk related to financial reporting can be identified by evaluating the various financial statements and reports of the companies by the accountants and financial analysis with the help of various analytical and control mechanism. This process of monitoring needs to be done on a timely basis (Duncan and Whittington 2014).

References

Arens, A.A., Elder, R.J., Beasley, M.S. and Hogan, C.E., 2016. Auditing and assurance services. Pearson.

Beasley, M.S., 2015. Auditing cases: An interactive learning approach. Prentice Hall.

Cannon, N. and Bedard, J.C., 2016. Auditing challenging fair value measurements: Evidence from the field. The Accounting Review.

Duncan, B. and Whittington, M., 2014, September. Compliance with standards, assurance and audit: Does this equal security?. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Security of Information and Networks (p. 77). ACM.

Hayes, R., Wallage, P. and Gortemaker, H., 2014. Principles of auditing: an introduction to international standards on auditing. Pearson Higher Ed.

Jans, M., Alles, M.G. and Vasarhelyi, M.A., 2014. A field study on the use of process mining of event logs as an analytical procedure in auditing. The Accounting Review, 89(5), pp.1751-1773.

Knechel, W.R. and Salterio, S.E., 2016. Auditing: Assurance and risk. Taylor & Francis.

Nalewaik, A. and Mills, A., 2016. Project Performance Review: Capturing the Value of Audit, Oversight, and Compliance for Project Success. CRC Press.

Titera, W.R., 2013. Updating audit standard—Enabling audit data analysis. Journal of Information Systems, 27(1), pp.325-331.

William Jr, M., Glover, S. and Prawitt, D., 2016. Auditing and assurance services: A systematic approach. McGraw-Hill Education.