You are retained by Columbia Corporation to audit its financial statements for the fiscal year ended June 30. Your consideration of internal control indicates a fairly satisfactory condition, although there are not enough employees to permit an extensive separation of duties. The company is one of the smaller units in its industry, but it has realized net income of about $500,000 in each of the last three years.
Near the end of your fieldwork, you overhear a telephone call received by the president of the company while you are discussing the audit with him. The telephone conversation indicates that on May 15 of the current year, the Columbia Corporation made an accommodation endorsement of a 60-day $430,000 note issued by a major customer, Brill Corporation, to its bank. The purpose of the telephone call from Brill was to inform your client that the note had been paid at the maturity date. You had not been aware of the existence of the note before overhearing the telephone call.
Required:
- a. From an ethical standpoint, do you think the auditors would be justified in acting on information acquired in this manner?
- b. Should the
balance sheet as of June 30 disclose thecontingent liability ? Give reasons for your answer. - c. Prepare a list of
auditing procedures that might have brought the contingency to light. Explain fully the likelihood of detection of the accommodation endorsement by each procedure listed.
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Principles Of Auditing & Other Assurance Services
- You are meeting with executives of Cooper Cosmetics Corporation toarrange your firm’s engagement to audit the corporation’s financial statements for the year ending December 31. One executive suggests the audit work be divided among three staff members. One person would examine asset accounts, a second would examine liability accounts, and the third would examine income and expense accounts to minimize audit time, avoid duplication of staff effort, and curtail interference with entity operations.Advertising is the corporation’s largest expense, and the advertising manager suggests that a staff member of your firm whose uncle owns the advertising agency that handles the corporation’s advertising be assigned to examine the Advertising Expense account because the staff member has a thorough knowledge of the complex contact between Cooper Cosmetics and the advertising agency. Required:a. To what extent should auditors follow the client’s suggestions for the conduct of an audit? Discuss.b.…arrow_forwardGinnian and Fitch, a regional accounting firm, performs yearly audits on a number of different for-profit and not-for-profit entities. Two years ago, Luisa Mellina, Ginnians partner in charge of operations, became concerned about the amount of audit time required by not-for-profit entities. As a result, she instituted a series of training programs focusing on the auditing of not-forprofit entities. Now, she would like to see if the training seemed to work. So, she ran a multiple regression on 22 months of data for Ginnian for three variables: the total monthly cost of audit professional time, the number of not-for-profit audits, and the hours of training in the audit of not-for-profit entities. The following printout was obtained: Required: 1. Write out the cost equation for Ginnians audit professional time. 2. If Ginnian expects to have 9 audits of not-for-profits next month and expects that audit professionals will have a total of 130 hours of not-for-profit training, what is the anticipated cost of professional time? 3. Are the hours spent auditing not-for-profit entities positively or negatively correlated with audit professional costs? Is percentage of experienced team members positively or negatively correlated with audit professional cost? 4. What does R2 mean in this equation? Overall, what is your evaluation of the cost equation that was developed for the cost of audit professionals?arrow_forwardYou are the audit senior responsible for the audit of Sampson Limited. You are currently planning the audit for the financial year ended 30 June 20X9. During your initial planning meeting held with the financial controller, he told you of the following change in the company’s operations. Sampson has planned to close an inefficient factory in country New South Wales before the end of the financial year. It is expected that the redeployment and disposal of the factory’s assets will not be completed until the end of the following financial year. However, the financial controller is confident that he will be able to determine reasonably accurate closure provisions. Required: Explain how the components of audit risk (inherent, control or detection risk) are affected in this scenario.arrow_forward
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- You are an auditor at a public accounting firm. The client you are dealing with is a transportation service company. This client in the last few years has reported a loss on his income statement and this year is the first year the accounting firm you work for audits this client, previously for several years it was audited by other accounting firms. Surprisingly, this client in the financial year you audited reported a double increase in performance from the previous year. If in the previous year the company reported a loss of USD 200,000,000, this year it reported a profit of USD 150,000,000. After further inspection, it was found that the reported profit came from B2B, Business to Business contract revenue between the client and a telecommunications service company related to the installation of communication facilities in the client's transportation fleet. This transaction reverses the client's income statement from the previous loss to profit. The employment contract agreement is…arrow_forwardIs it an entity inherent risk for the information below? Supervisors working at Marco Inc. interview all perspective employees for positions they supervise. In addition, at least one of the corporate officers also interviews each perspective employee. Most of the key employees, including the officers, have been with Marco for more than ten years. However, due to the high demand for accountants, Stephen Violet an accountant and most of the accounting staff have been employed at Marco for less than 3 years. While Marco checks references for any prospective employee, they do not check criminal records or perform other forms of background checks. If it is an inherent risk, what is the feature of the firm that will possibly affect inherent risk and explain how and why; that is whether it increases or decreases inherent risk. Please address a specific risk to the accuracy of the financial statements with the "how" and whether audit effort should be increased or decreased for specific…arrow_forwardThe firm of McGraw and West, CPAS, has two offices, one in Phoenix and one in San Diego. The firm has audited the Cameron Corporation out of its Phoenix office for the past five years. For each of the following independent cases, which occurred during the year under audit, indicate whether Independence would be impaired. a. Mary McGraw, a partner in the San Diego office, fell wildly in love with Bill Smith, the treasurer for Cameron Corporation. They were married in Las Vegas. During the week, McGraw still lives in San Diego and works in that office, while Bill Smith lives in Phoenix, working for Cameron. On weekends they commute to their home In Yuma. Mary does not participate in the engagement. b. Jim West is the father of Will West, a Phoenix partner. Jim West has a material Investment in Cameron. Will West is unaware of his father's Investment but does participate in the engagement. c. Bill Johnson, a senior in the San Diego office, has a material Investment in the capital stock of…arrow_forward
- The annual examination of Felton Company’s financial statements by its external public accounting firm (auditors) is nearing completion. The following conversation took place between the controller of Felton Company (Francie) and the audit manager from the public accounting firm (Sumana):Sumana: You know, Francie, we are about to wrap up our audit for this fiscal year. Yet, there is one item still to be resolved.Francie: What’s that?Sumana: Well, as you know, at the beginning of the year, Felton began a defined benefit pension plan. This plan promises your employees an annual payment when they retire, using a formula based on their salaries at retirement and their years of service. I believe that a pension expense should be recognized this year, equal to the amount of pension earned by your employees.Francie: Wait a minute. I think you have it all wrong. The company doesn’t have a pension expense until it actually pays the pension in cash when the employee retires. After all, some of…arrow_forwardOn October 21, Rank & Brink, a CIA firm, was retained by Suncraft Appliance Corporation to perform an audit for the year ended December 31. A month later, James Minor, president of the corporation, invited the CIA firm’s partners, George Rand and Alice Brink, to attend a meeting off all officers of the corporation. Mr. Minor opened the meeting with the following statement: “All of you know that we are not in a very liquid position, and our October 31 balance sheet show it. We need to raise some outside capital in January, and our December 31 financial statements (both balance sheet and income statement) must look reasonably good if we’re going to make a favorable impression upon lenders or investors. I want every officer of this company to do everything possible during the next month to ensure that, at December 31, our financial statements look as strong as possible, especially our current position and our earnings.” “I have invited our auditors to attend this meeting so…arrow_forwardYou are an audit supervisor assigned to a new client which is listed on a Stock Exchange. You visited the corporate headquarters to become acquainted with key personnel and to conduct a preliminary review of the company’s accounting policies, controls, and systems. During this visit, (j) The enhanced network firewall project appeared to be on a very aggressive implementation schedule. The IT manager mentioned that even if he put all of his personnel on the project for the next five weeks, he still would not complete the project in time. The manager has mentioned this to company management, which seems unwilling to modify the schedule. Identify the problems and explain them in relation to the internal environment.arrow_forward
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