Each of us once heard the strange and unfamiliar word “Audit”, and also came across such a concept as audit activity. Very often, questions arise about what do people in this profession do? Many people have false associations with work in the field of sound servicing events, but this is not so: auditors are not sound engineers! Auditing is much more interesting, complex and responsible.
Auditing activity is a check of the financial statements of enterprises, the correctness of documentation, the display of economic activity in the internal documents of the enterprise and the transfer of data to the financial statements. Auditing activities in the Russian Federation began to develop with the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, only from the 2000s can we talk about the beginning of the real development of auditing in Russia, because at that time such world-famous audit companies as Pricewaterhouse Coopers, KPMG, Ernst & Young came to our country other.
As we have already said, the audit activity is to verify the correctness of the display of business operations. 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. Say, if we are talking about buying any materials, the invoice will be the primary document; if we display the value of fixed assets, then the act of commissioning will also be considered as the primary document .
After the transactions have been displayed in the primary documents, they are recorded in the journal of business operations, which records the essence of the transaction and the offsetting accounts for which the debit and credit are recorded. After the transaction is recorded in the journal, an appropriate entry is made in the statements for both offsetting accounts, and at the end of the year, the final balances for all accounts are displayed in the balance sheet and other documents of the 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 accounting - from the primary document to the reporting. As a rule, the audit is carried out in separate accounting sections, that is, the accounting of fixed assets, receivables and payables is separately checked. debts, settlements with customers, cash flows and so on. The need for separate audits for each accounting section is explained by the extremely large amount of work and, as a consequence, the high probability of errors and inaccuracies in the audit of “all at once”.
The audit activity concludes by presenting a letter of conclusion to the company management in which the auditor expresses his opinion regarding the state of affairs at the enterprise. In this conclusion, he indicates inaccuracies and irregularities found during the audit. In general, the conclusion can be of three types: positive if there are no violations, conditionally positive if there are violations that do not exceed the materiality threshold, and negative if the auditor has found significant violations. The materiality threshold is adopted in the amount of five percent deviation of the value of the indicator displayed in the statements from its current value.
Audit activity plays an important role in the functioning of the economic mechanism of both individual enterprises and the economy of the country as a whole, because thanks to the auditors, many errors in the financial statements are avoided, as well as opposition to the commission of various economic frauds.