The 2023 GAGAS exposure draft proposes auditors apply a formal three-step process to protect audit quality.
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Safeguards to Independence
One of the best safeguards to independence is to withdraw from the audit engagement entirely. Fortunately, that’s not the only solution.
Parallelism and Paul Simon
Make your audit reports more dynamic by using parallelism: Similar words, phrases, bulleted lists and other grammatical elements to emphasize similar ideas in a sentence.
Independence is Required of a CPA Performing Yellow Book Audits
It is no surprise that independence is required of a CPA performing Yellow Book audits, but what does surprise many CPAs is how directly the GAO addresses one bad habit that CPA’s continue to engage in.
What is the job of an auditor?
Maybe the dog will listen to you describe auditor independence, audit subject matter, audit criteria and audit deliverables. Auditors, I suggest you keep your job title on the down-low when meeting someone new at a party. Why? Because just as soon as you reveal you are an auditor, your new acquaintance will get very quiet. […]
Ethical guidelines for auditors
The GAO’s ethical guidelines for auditors remind us who we are and why we do what we do. And this is a very good thing, because it is easy to get balled up in the details of our day-to-day work and, forgetting the bigger picture of who we are and what we do, take the […]
The Difference Between Fraud, Waste and Abuse
The difference between fraud, waste and abuse is a matter of degrees. Only fraud is a reportable condition under Yellow Book standards.
The Implementation Date of the 2018 Yellow Book is Near
The implementation date of the 2018 Yellow Book is near for performance auditors – audits beginning after July 1 this year! Check out this quote from the introductory letter of the 2018 Yellow Book: The 2018 revision of Government Auditing Standards is effective for financial audits, attestation engagements, and reviews of financial statements for periods […]
Focus on a narrow audit objective
The 2018 version of the Yellow Book mentions audit objectives 163 times in one chapter on performance audits! That tells me that objectives run the show! And you know, the broader your audit objective, the longer your audit becomes and the harder your audit report is to write. Narrow audit objectives keep your audit […]