Professional Documents
Culture Documents
8262
8262
https://testbankfan.com/product/auditing-an-international-
approach-8th-edition-smieliauskas-test-bank/
https://testbankfan.com/product/auditing-an-international-
approach-6th-edition-smieliauskas-test-bank/
https://testbankfan.com/product/auditing-an-international-
approach-5th-edition-smieliauskas-test-bank/
https://testbankfan.com/product/auditing-canadian-7th-edition-
smieliauskas-solutions-manual/
Auditing Canadian 7th Edition Smieliauskas Test Bank
https://testbankfan.com/product/auditing-canadian-7th-edition-
smieliauskas-test-bank/
https://testbankfan.com/product/principles-of-auditing-an-
introduction-to-international-standards-on-auditing-3rd-edition-
heyes-solutions-manual/
https://testbankfan.com/product/principles-of-auditing-an-
introduction-to-international-standards-on-auditing-3rd-edition-
hayes-solutions-manual/
https://testbankfan.com/product/auditing-cases-an-interactive-
learning-approach-7th-edition-beasley-solutions-manual/
https://testbankfan.com/product/auditing-cases-an-interactive-
learning-approach-6th-edition-beasley-solutions-manual/
CHAPTER 6
6-1 Business risk is the risk to the auditee that it will be unable to achieve its business objectives or execute its
strategies. Understanding management’s risk assessment process helps to assess the risk that the financial
statements could be materially misstated. Auditing standards (e.g., CICA Handbook - Assurance, CAS 315)
emphasize the auditor’s need to understand business risk and the “entity’s risk assessment process” in order to
plan and execute appropriate audit procedures. This is referred to in the text as the business risk approach to
planning and executing the audit. The auditor may identify risks of material misstatement that management’s risk
assessment process failed to identify and if the auditor believes there is a material weakness in the entity’s risk
assessment process, the auditor needs to communicate this to the audit committee or equivalent. Generally, the
business risk approach requires the auditor to take a broader view of the whole organization and assess the risks
of material misstatements that arise from a variety of aspects of the business.
6-2 The two parts of business analysis are strategic analysis and business process analysis. The goal of business analysis
is to learn about the auditee’s analysis of the risks its business faces, in particular, whether the analysis identifies
all material business risks.
6-3 Auditor’s knowledge of the business (e.g., from previous audits of companies in the same or similar industries) is
the key to understanding the risks associated with a particular auditee’s business strategy. Common risks
associated with a business strategy are risks of cost leadership, risks of differentiation, and risks of focus. These are
discussed in the chapter appendix. Senior management is the chief source of information about the auditee
company’s business strategy.
6-4 A business processes is a structured set of activities within the entity that is designed to produce a specific output
in accordance with the business strategy (eg. Revenue Process, Production Process).
6-5 Business processes are the source of the transactions and events that need to be captured in the business’s
information system and its financial statements, so it is important for auditors to understand the business
processes that create evidence that can support the validity and accuracy of the information that ends up in the
financial statements.
If the business process produces value-added output in the way that the strategy intended it to do, it is more likely
that the business will achieve its objectives and not fall prey to the various risks. The purpose of business process
analysis is to identify the system to assure adherence to the business strategy. The auditor must understand the
process and identify key sub-processes to examine in detail these key sub-processes, inherent business risk
associated with the sub-process, and the control environment associated with the sub-process. The information
the auditor seeks to learn about a target business process are the following: process objectives (i.e., role in
achieving the entity’s business objectives), process activities, classes of accounting transactions and cycles
employed, process risks, and process controls. This understanding of the business process helps the auditor to
assess what are the most significant risks of material misstatement of the financial statements.
6-6 External performance measures are key performance indicators reported to analysts, creditors and shareholders
(sales compared to industry benchmark). Internal performance measures are those used for personnel review and
incentive programs like bonus plans (divisional profit compare to other division or last years results). These uses
can create pressures on the business that may increase the risk that managers are motivated to misstate the
financial statements. Events or conditions that indicate an incentive or pressure to commit fraud or provide an
opportunity are referred to as “fraud risk factors”. For example, the need to meet expectations of third parties to
6-7 Gimmicks to manipulate earnings include inappropriate revenue or expense recognition to move profits from
future to current period or vice versa, failing to accrue liabilities, fabricating ‘transactions’ that boost profits, etc.
6-8 Quality of earnings refers to the company’s ability to continue to earn profits on a similar basis to its current
earnings, both in terms of the amounts and the trends over relatively long periods of time. Quality earnings will be
consistent and highly associated with the underlying core business activities (eg. Income from operations).
6-9 The auditor has a continuing responsibility to communicate any suspicions or evidence of fraud, to a level of
management higher than the employees involved in the case of lower-level employees. If the possible fraud
involves high-level managers the auditor must communicate this with those charged with governance, such as the
audit committee or the board of directors. The auditor is responsible for communicating any suspected or known
fraud with management and those charged with governance on a timely basis, regardless of the stage of audit
work.
1. Existence assertion:
The practical objective is to establish with evidence that assets, liabilities and equities actually exist and that
sales and expense transactions actually occurred. Cut-off can be considered an aspect of the existence
assertion (Existence in a specified time period). CAS 315 uses the term occurrence when existence is
applied to transactions.
2. Completeness assertion:
The practical objective is to establish with evidence that all transactions of the period are in the financial
statements and all transactions that properly belong in the preceding or following accounting periods are
excluded. Another term for these aspects of completeness is cut-off.
Completeness also refers to proper inclusion in financial statements of all assets, liabilities, revenue,
expense and related disclosures.
6-11 Assertions are the focal points for all audit procedures because they are the fundamental management claims that
are being audited. Audit procedures produce evidence that relates to one or more specific assertions. As will be
explained in in Chapter 8, auditors use “audit objectives” that are derived from the five principal assertions to
6-12 Auditing completeness involves getting evidence about what is not there. Auditors have to depend on
management’s representations to some extent, and corroborate these with evidence from a variety of sources,
including internal controls. There is rarely a ‘slam dunk’ type of procedure that provides strong conclusive evidence
that everything that should have been included has been included.
6-13 Auditors should think about what could go wrong in a particular assertion because this is an effective thought
process for assessing the risk that there is a material misstatement related to the assertion. There are many ways
that error and fraud can affect the assertions, so a creative thinking technique is helpful for assessing risk in an
audit.
6-14 An audit plan will be made up of a set of audit programs, which contain specific descriptions of the ‘audit work’ -
this refers to all the audit procedures that will be performed by the audit team to gather evidence and give them
assurance about whether or not there is a material misstatement. If you are given an audit program with a list of
audit procedures and are using them to plan this year’s audit, you need to consider: “What are the assertions
management is making by reporting this financial information?” Which assertion(s) does this procedure produce
evidence about?” “Does the list of procedures (the audit program) test all the assertions?”
6-15 The four risks included in the audit risk model and their descriptions are:
Inherent risk: the probability that material misstatements, due to errors or fraud, have entered the data
processing system.
Control risk: the probability that the auditee’s system of internal control will fail to detect material
misstatements, provided any enter the accounting system in the first place.
Detection risk: the probability that audit procedures will fail to find material misstatements, provided any
have entered the system and have not been detected or corrected by the auditee’s internal
control system.
Audit risk (also sometimes called “overall risk” or “tolerable risk” or “ultimate risk”): a concept applied both to the
probability of giving an inappropriate opinion and to the probability of failing to discover
material misstatements in a particular disclosure or account balance. It represents the
amount of risk the audit is accepting, for example if audit risk is 5% the auditor is accepting a
5% probability of giving the wrong audit opinion. Another way of thinking of audit risk is the
complement of assurance - so at 5% audit risk the auditor is 95% sure that the financial
statements are not misstated
The audit risk model is a conceptual model of how the four types of risk are related. Audit risk is a combination of
the other risks:
6-16 The audit risk level an auditor will be willing to accept varies according to auditee and engagement circumstances.
Generally, the riskier the auditee or the more users rely on the audited financial statements, the lower the planned
audit risk. As the possibility of being sued for material misstatement increases, an auditor will decrease planned
audit risk to compensate for the increased risk associated with the engagement. This possibility of negative
consequences for the auditor tends to be higher when the company is listed on a public stock exchange, when the
company is in financial difficulty, and when users are making significant financial decisions based directly on
audited financial statement information.
6-17 Inherent risk assessment will vary from auditee to auditee and is an important application of the auditors
understanding of the business risks. It is helpful to assess inherent risk on an assertion by assertion basis, as
sometimes the risk arises mainly from one assertion (e.g. valuation of accounts receivable when the auditee has a
liberal credit policy). Accounts with high inherent risk are those subject to misstatement because of complexity
(inventory valuation in a manufacturing business), volume (sales transactions in a large retail business), likelihood
6-18 Some well accepted control frameworks are: Canadian Criteria of Control Committee (COCO); Committee of
Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission, Internal Control – Integrated Framework (COSO); and
Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology, published by the IT Governance Institute (COBIT).
6-19 In connection with auditor’s judgments about internal control, anchoring is the mental carryover of prior
knowledge and the application of prior conclusions to the current control system, usually without gathering much
new evidence.
Some of the effects of bad economic times that create risk of material misstatement, and auditors should be alert
to detect in auditees’ financial statements, include:
6-21 “Audit risk in an overall sense” refers to the audit taken as a whole and the probability that an auditor will give an
inappropriate opinion on financial statements. Generally, this is the risk of giving the standard unqualified report
when the financial statements contain material misstatements or the report should be qualified or modified in
some manner.
“Audit risk applied to individual account balances” refers to the probability that auditors will fail to discover
misstatement in a particular account balance at least equal to the tolerable misstatement assigned to the audit of
that balance. This version of audit risk is applied in concept at the individual account balance level.
6-22 In theory, the materiality decision (how much precision is required in the audit opinion) is independent of audit
risk decision (how much assurance is required in the audit opinion). It is helpful for an auditor to keep these two
considerations separate since the materiality decision focuses on what dollar amount of misstatement is likely to
affect users’ decisions, while the audit risk level decision is focused on the audit firm and how careful it wants to
be to avoid providing a clean opinion on materially misstated financial statements. In practice, the two concepts
are related because they have a similar impact on the amount of audit evidence required, for example when a
fraud is suspected a smaller materiality level is used - this has the same result as using a lower tolerable audit risk
level. Materiality and audit risk decisions both have an impact on the auditor’s decisions on the nature, extent and
timing of audit evidence to be gathered.
6-23 Business risk needs to be considered in assessing audit risk. Audit risk relates to accurate reporting on business
risks, thus, the higher the business risks the greater the need to report them accurately. As a consequence, the
general relationship is that the higher the auditee’s business risk the lower the planned audit risk needs to be.
Revenue process
X X Inventory
X Fixed assets
X Accum depreciation
X Accounts payable
X Accrued expenses
X General expense
X Bank loans
X Long term notes
X Accrued interest
X Capital stock
X Retained earnings
X Dividends declared
X Interest expense
X Income tax expense
An accounting process can also be referred to as a ‘cycle’, because transaction information from the same type of
business process (e.g., a sale on account) will run through the same set of accounts over and over during an
accounting period (e.g., sales revenue, accounts receivable and cash are the main accounts involved in recording
sales on account). A cycle perspective groups the set of accounts affected by a particular class of transaction
together for audit examination, which often increases efficiency.
6-25 The cash account is represented in all the processes/cycles, because: (a) cash receipts are involved in cash sales
and collections of accounts receivable (revenue process), (b) cash receipts arise from issuing shares and loan
proceeds (finance process), (c) cash disbursements are involved in buying inventory and capital assets and paying
for expenses purchases process), and (d) cash disbursements are involved in paying wages and overhead expenses
(production process).
6-26 Predictable relations should exist among the accounts in each process/cycle. Also, the audit evidence that is
available for one component of the process often also contains information for other components, because high-
volume routine transactions are recorded using the journal entries. A process groups the accounts related
because a typical routine transaction (e.g. recording a sale, or paying salaries) affects them all.
EP6-1 Industry risks include: competition, product integrity, labelling, suppliers of organic products may be hard to find,
demand for products and willingness to pay higher prices is very uncertain.
Regulatory risks include: ‘organic’ registration and certification is required, standards need to be complied with to
qualify, and this requires appropriate compliance systems and monitoring by management.
Operating risks include: real estate investments’ location and value, new store acquisitions, perishable inventory to
be managed, possibility of product liability if unsafe food products are sold, etc.
All these risks have an impact on accounting in this business. Product inventory valuation is complex because
estimates of costs are required and valuation depends on determining salability of the various organic food
products. There are valuation issues related to whether products are eligible for ‘organic’ labelling, and can be sold
for adequate prices that cover costs on a timely basis given the perishable nature. Accounting for real estate used
in the business also raises issues such as whether locations are viable, whether investments are recoverable as any
impairment must be identified for valuation of these assets. There are also possible and contingent liabilities that
need to be disclosed or recorded if required by the accounting framework.
EP6-2 Audit issues that affect audit risk and risk of material misstatement include:
• Cyclical industry: This increases volatility in the net income and reported numbers. This may make it harder to
identify trends or do analytical procedures where year end balances are compared to prior years. It could
also create the incentive for managers to do earnings management in order to present smoother earnings
year over year and result in a higher risk of misstatement.
• Related party transactions: The company has significant revenues coming from a related company. This could
raise a concern that the sales are not done at fair value. Evidence will need to be obtained to consider the fair
market value of the services. The auditor will also need to ensure that related parties, and the transactions
and balances are accounted for and disclosed in accordance with the reporting framework.
• Large Acquisition: A large unusual and complex transaction occurred in the current year as there was a
business acquisition. This makes the accounting more complex and increases the risk of an error in the
financial reporting as the new business needs to be consolidated with Bellows Home Inspection. The auditor
will need to do additional procedures on the acquisition and consolidation of the financial statements at the
date of acquisition.
• Weak internal controls in the acquired company: Weak internal controls over financial reporting increase the
risk that an error in the financial statements will not be detected by the entity’s existing set of internal
controls. This will likely require that additional audit procedures to be done, especially for the financial
results provided for Home Guards.
• New User: The bank is a new user this year as they are one of the main creditor for the company. The
auditor will need to gain an understanding of the bank’s needs with the financial statements, so they can
ensure they can respond to their needs and adjust materiality if needed. The increased distribution increases
risk of the audit as there are more users relying and making decisions based on the financial statements.
EP6-3
The following accounts would be affected by the financing transaction:
• Cash: The cash balance would increase by the amount received for the loan
• Bank Debt: The liabilities would increase as a new loan needs to be recorded for the balance owed to the
bank.
• Accrued Interest: The accrued interest will need to be adjusted at month end for any interest expense
incurred by the company that hasn’t been paid.
• Interest Expense: Interest expense would need to be recorded for the portion of the interest incurred during
the year.
• Income Tax expense: Will be impacted by the amount of interest as interest is tax deductible.
EP6-5 Auditors should pay particular attention to external and internal performance measures for the following reasons:
Quality of earnings refers to a company’s ability to replicate its earnings, both in terms of the amounts and the
trends over relatively long periods of time. While users are particularly interested in high quality earnings that are
informative about future performance, managers likewise have incentives to paint the best picture possible.
Auditors have to consider whether the earnings reported reflect actual underlying economic performance and also
provide a realistic basis for users to assess whether the performance is repeatable in future.
External performance measures reported to analysts, creditors and shareholders and internal performance
measures used for personnel review and incentive programs like bonus plans can create pressures on the business
that may increase risk that managers are motivated to misstate financial statements.
For example, the need to meet expectations of third parties to obtain additional equity financing or the granting of
significant bonuses if unrealistic profit targets are met may create pressure to manipulate financial reports through
aggressive accounting choices even to the point of that an auditor may assess that the risk of fraudulent reporting
is significant.
EP-6-6 Existence: It is important to ensure that the accounts received exist (i.e. it comes from a third client and does
represent an amount owed to the company for a service or good provided).
Rights and Obligation: It is important to ensure that client is the rightful owner of the Accounts Receivable. If he
is not the rightful owner, then this would not represent an asset for the company as they are not legally entitled to
the money.
Completeness: It is important to ensure that all outstanding accounts receivable of the client as at the balance
sheet date are included in the account receivable balance. If an account receivable is not recorded, this would
understate the value of the assets.
Valuation and allocation: It is important to audit the allowance for doubtful accounts that is linked to the Accounts
Receivable. This will ensure that the proper provision for uncollectible debt has been taken and that, on a net
basis, the accounts receivable will be presented for the amount of cash the company can expect to collect in the
a) Ohlsen is not justified in acting upon a belief that IR = 0. He may have seen no adjustments proposed
because (1) none were material or (2) Limberg’s control system has functioned well in the past and
prevented/detected/corrected material errors. If IR = 0, then AR = 0 and no further audit work need be
done. Auditing standards and practice do not permit this level of (non)work based on this little evidence
and knowledge.
b) Jones is not justified in acting upon a belief that CR = 0. She may well know that Lang’s internal accounting
control is exceptionally good, but (1) her review did not cover the last month of Lang’s fiscal year and (2)
control procedures are always subject to lapses, and management override is always a possibility.
Therefore, CR can never equal zero. If CR = 0, that implies AR = 0 and no further audit work would need be
done. Audit practice does not permit an initial assessment of control risk at zero to the exclusion of other
audit procedures.
c) Insofar as audit effectiveness is concerned, Fields’ decision is within the spirit of audit standards. Even if IR =
1 and CR = 1, if DR = 0.02, the AR = 0.02. This audit risk (AR) seems quite small. However, Fields’ decision
may result in an inefficient audit.
d) This case was deliberately left ambiguous, without putting probability numbers on the audit risks. Students
will need to experiment with the model. One approach is to compare the current audit to a hypothetical
last year’s audit when “everything was operating smoothly.” Assume:
An alternative analysis is that Shad perceived higher inherent and control risk early, and he did not put audit time
into trying to assess the risks at less than 100%. He proceeded directly to performance of extensive substantive
procedures and worked a lesser total number of hours, yet still performed a high-quality audit by keeping AR low
by keeping DR low. In this case, however, Shad would still need to do at least a cursory examination of controls,
and document the conclusion, to provide support in the audit file for the assessment of control risk as being very
high, and the decision not to rely on internal control (see CAS 200, paragraph 7).
a) The inherent risk assessments can take into consideration the nature of the item and the risk that an error
can have occurred in accounting for that item in the first place
c) Procedures can be described that relate to identifying risk and the controls in place to mitigate those risks.
The assessment involves judgment as to whether the inherent risk is adequately reduced by the control
procedure, and whether the procedure is being followed so as to effectively reduce the risk to a reasonable
level.
DC6-3 a)
Incentive: Taking out a loan for yourself or a close family member would result in a direct increase in cash for the
individual and their family. This could be spent in a variety of ways that could directly improve one’s lifestyle.
Further, by closing more loans (even if it was to oneself) the bonus of the sales person would increase as they had
closed more loans during the given year.
Opportunity: The lack of controls on small business loans of $500K or less was at the center of this fraud. With
no credit review, it was easy for the sales people to issue loans to themselves or close family member. They didn’t
need to collude with anyone. With no one reviewing the disbursement, it was also easy for them to get away with
this for a long period of time.
Rationalization: It appears that some of the sales people rationalized the initial loans by saying this was temporary
– they needed the money now as their bonuses were only paid after year end, so they technically had “earned”
this money and would pay it back. Also, as 20 sales people are reported to have done this, there is a possible
“everyone is doing it” effect. If all the sales people are taking out small business loans, it will make the act look
much more normal and some may use this as a rational to justify their actions.
The primary reason for conducting an evaluation of an auditee’s existing internal control system is to give the
auditors a basis for finalizing the details of the account balance audit program--to determine the nature, timing
and extent of subsequent substantive audit procedures. (See CAS 200, paragraph 7.)
A secondary purpose for conducting an evaluation of internal control is to be able to make constructive
suggestions for improvements. Officially, the profession considers these suggestions a part of the audit function
and does not define the work as management consulting.
Another purpose of the evaluation is to report to management and the board of directors or its audit committee
any discovery of “any reportable conditions” of internal control deficiencies. These conditions may suggest a high
risk of error, fraud or other irregularities.
b)
Current Assets =2,392,421
Current Liabilities =1,451,844
Current ratio = 1.6 to 1.0
CR analysis can tell you liquidity is good - CA can support paying CL. The auditor might do more a rigorous
test with fuel futures excluded (then CR = 1.2 to 1, so not as safe but still okay) - low risk of bankruptcy
A/R turnover tells us that the net A/R balance is collected about twice a month - with 10-day payment terms
this is longer than their collection policy. It suggests there may be some collection delays that can result in
higher risk of bad debts - need to investigate sufficiency of AFBD provision.
c) Materiality levels
Quantitative starting point: 5-10% normal operating income
Base: Calculate “normal income” from trial balance data
NIBT= $1.6 million
d) The auditor’s decision on acceptable audit risk level is based on nature of engagement, consequences of audit
failure
Factors to note, with appropriate impact on audit level acceptance:
• Public vs. private company -- OMS is private, would raise AR willing to accept
• Users making risky financial decisions from f/s -- new investors will use audited f/s to check trends using
this year’s audited f/s, possible to calculate and earnings based purchase price, would lower AR
• Auditee financial health/risk of business failure -- OMS financially sound, may raise AR acceptable
• --OMS has plans to grow so faces new risks if strategy doesn’t work - may lower acceptable AR
• Management’s reputation/integrity, willingness accept responsibilities for preparing GAAP f/s,
designing and implementing adequate I/C and to provide written representations -- at OMS this
appears as no problems stated in case, also can support raising acceptable AR level
• Overall, some factors indicate the auditor can accept higher risk and other suggest it should be lower.
This indicates the auditor can accept a moderate level of AR for the OMS audit. Using the guidance in
the case, of the three choices ‘low, lower, lowest’ the ‘lower’ level is appropriate.
e) In order to design an effective audit, auditors must understand the business and the economic environment of
the business including factors such as:
• economic conditions -
• geographic locations -
• developments in taxation and regulation -
• specific industry characteristics & risks -
• business objectives-
• key strategies employed to meet those objectives - quality control, research/improve production
processes, etc.
• risks that threaten achievement of those objectives -
Consider the following case facts in relation to the above business risk factors:
• 80% credit sales - collection risk
• Extras not well controlled as main moving contract since no segregation of collection and ability to not
report - risk of incorrect billings
• Manager discounts may be inappropriate - could allow kickback scheme
• Unrealized gains on futures as revenues - could be risky if lack internal expertise, use of estimates
creates misstatement risk
• Plan to expand, may fail and bring whole company down
• Destroying customer property - insurance can increase,
• Economic - interest rates, increase insurance premiums overall
• Geographic - spread out
• Few assets for amount of services selling - could lower quality and damage reputation and future sales
f) Revenues transactions arise from credit and cash sales. There are different services with different revenue
transactions streams: moving, extra moving services, storage services
i- Stock up your freezer promotion: This may indicate be a strategy to shift revenues from a future period to the
current period as customers were encouraged to purchase goods in December even if they were only going
to be used in future periods. Revenues should only be recognized when they are earned. If the transaction
was completed (paid and shipped to the client) prior to year-end, then the revenue recognition criteria have
been met, even if the client only uses the product at a future date (BCI completed their end of the deal).
The risk of material misstatement is however increased as Jackie indicated that they had trouble keeping up
with deliveries, so some of the sales claimed for December may not have actually been delivered before
year end. This suggests a cut-off issue and additional testing should be done on these sales to ensure all
sales recorded were in fact shipped prior to year-end. There is a risk of material misstatement related to the
revenue existence/occurrence assertion.
ii – Revenue Recognition – Weddings: The change in the revenue recognition policy could indicate a bias to
increase net income for the current year by recognizing a portion of the revenues from an event that is to
take place in the following accounting period. The fact that no one else in the industry seems to adopt this
policy suggests it is an aggressive accounting policy and increases the risk of a material misstatement for the
audit. There is a risk of material misstatement related to the revenue existence/occurrence assertion.
Additional procedures and enquiries will be needed to decide if this change in accounting policy is
acceptable. Jackie does have a point that an effort to secure the contract and go over the initial planning is
made in the current period and it could be argued that a portion of the revenues should be recognized in
the current period. However, the fact that they currently recognize 20% of the revenues while only 10% is
non-refundable. Since it can be argued that only the 10% non-refundable portion should be recognized
before the wedding is held, the company’s preferred approach suggests once again that BCI is adopting an
aggressive revenue recognition policy. There is a risk of material misstatement related to the revenue
existence/occurrence assertion.
BCI is currently the subject of a lawsuit for misrepresentation with regards to the content of their organic
lunch boxes. Accounting guidelines normally require that a provision be booked if it is likely that BCI will be
liable and an amount can be reasonably estimated. Jackie is dismissing the lawsuit, however, BSP cannot
simply rely on Jackie’s statement. The fact that no provision was booked is in line with a bias to increase net
income for the period. This increases the risk of material misstatement in relation to the completeness
assertion for liabilities.
Additional procedures such as discussion with management and confirmations with external legal counsel
should be performed on this particular claim to determine if it is likely that BCI will be found liable.