The activity of any enterprise is necessarily connected with the use of fixed assets, such as equipment, machine tools, buildings, cars, as well as various intangible assets, which can also be considered as fixed assets. An audit of fixed assets at an enterprise will be necessary sooner or later, since even the best accountant, using the most advanced technical means of working with accounting, will certainly make some mistakes that can lead to a fairly significant distortion of the results of financial statements. Moreover, an error can creep in at any of the stages of accounting: it can be the execution of primary documents, and the recording of a business transaction in registers, and the presentation of data in the ledger and, as a result, in financial statements. That is why audit procedures are absolutely necessary, because they lead to the improvement of the enterprise accounting system.
It should be noted that among audit procedures, the audit of fixed assets is far from the only type of audit. There are many other audit procedures. These include audits of receivables and payables, stock audits, audits of invested capital. The most important type of audit is the audit of the financial results of the organization - thanks to this type of audit, the company's management knows for sure whether there were any violations in the preparation of the financial statements and determining the financial result of the company for a certain period. If no significant violations and errors were found, this means that all taxes and dividends to shareholders were correctly paid, and the company can further develop in the direction in which it planned.
An audit of fixed assets consists of several stages - planning an audit, concluding an audit contract, drawing up a verification program, actually conducting verification procedures and generating a conclusion based on the information received. In order to obtain the necessary information, it is necessary to check the OS objects for compliance with the following criteria:
Existence - this criterion means that the auditor must personally verify that the OS object specified in the documents, whether it is a machine, building or car, really exists in the form and condition in which it passes according to the documentation. To do this, the auditor needs to take an inventory of OS objects, during which he personally verify the existence of all OS recorded in the documentation.
Ownership is another critical criterion. The inspector must establish whether the company really has the right to own the OS objects indicated in the balance sheet, for which it checks the primary documents and the terms of delivery of fixed assets.
The third and perhaps most important criterion is assessment. The audit of fixed assets is impossible without checking the correctness of the assessment of fixed assets and depreciation. The inspector must make sure that the depreciation method corresponds to the one chosen in the order on the accounting policy, as well as that all charges are mathematically correct.
After the audit of fixed assets has been completed, the inspector makes a conclusion about the state of affairs at the enterprise, which, depending on the identification of various types of violations, can be positive, positive with reservations, or negative if the revealed violations can significantly distort the further reflection of the financial condition of the enterprise in reporting.
A regular audit of fixed assets will be the key to the absence of any violations in accounting, and, therefore, ensure the absence of heart and headache from the head of the company for many years.