Auditing activity: the essence and basic nuances

Each of us once heard the strange and unfamiliar word "Audit", as well as faced with such a notion as auditing. Very often there are questions about what people do in this profession? Many have false associations with work in the sphere of sound services for events, but this is not the case: auditors are not sound engineers! Auditing is much more interesting, complicated and responsible.

Auditing activity is a check of the financial statements of enterprises, the correctness of the documentation, the display of economic activities in the internal documents of the enterprise and the transfer of data to the financial statements. Audit activity in the Russian Federation began to develop with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but only in the two thousand years, we can talk about the beginning of a real audit development in Russia, because it was at this time that such world-renowned audit firms as Pricewaterhouse Coopers, KPMG, Ernst & Young and others.

As we have already said, the audit activity consists in verifying the correctness of the mapping of operations of economic activity. Note that each business transaction is displayed in the documentation of the enterprise more than once. First of all, it is displayed in the so-called primary document, which is the main evidence of the operation. For example, if we are talking about the purchase of any materials, the primary document will be a waybill; If we display the value of fixed assets, then as an initial document will also be considered an act of commissioning.

After the transactions have been displayed in the primary documents, they are registered in the business transaction log, in which the essence of the transaction and correspondent accounts are recorded , for which debit and credit are recorded. After the transaction is registered in the journal, an entry is made in the statements for both corresponding accounts, and at the end of the year, the final balance for all accounts is displayed in the balance sheet and other financial statements of the enterprise.

The task of the auditor, first of all, is to check the correctness of the display of the business transaction at all stages of record keeping - from the primary document to the reporting. As a rule, the audit is carried out for individual areas of accounting, that is, the accounting of fixed assets, accounts receivable and payable Debts, settlements with customers, cash flows and so on. The necessity of conducting separate checks for each section of the account is explained by the extremely large amount of work and, as a consequence, the high probability of errors and inaccuracies in the audit of "everything at once".

Auditing activity is completed by submitting a letter-conclusion to the company's management, in which the auditor expresses his opinion on the state of affairs at the enterprise. In this derivation, it indicates inaccuracies and violations found during the audit. In general, the conclusion can be of three types: positive in the absence of violations, conditional-positive in case of detection of violations that do not exceed the threshold of materiality, and negative if the auditor discovered significant violations. The threshold of materiality is adopted in the amount of 5% deviation of the value of the indicator displayed in the reporting, from its present value.

Auditing activity plays an important role in the functioning of the economic mechanism of both individual enterprises and the country's economy as a whole, because auditors avoid the occurrence of a multitude of errors in financial reporting, and also counteracts the commission of various economic machinations.