Auditing-Period 5

Auditing involves the testing and evaluation of evidence against agreed norms or criteria. The auditor has an important societal function because financial statement users (e.g., shareholders) and other stakeholders require some level of third party assurance on the qualitative aspects of information found in the financial statements, such as information reliability and relevance. For example, shareholders require primarily assurance about the reliability of financial statements, since they use these statements for their professional decision-making. Providers of debt financing, such as banks, need to know whether the presented liquidity ratios are accurate.

The course will focus on the role of the auditor in society and what demands this role imposes on the auditor. We start by giving an introduction to the demand for auditing, relying on the theoretical economic foundations of the profession. Next, the course focuses on the audit process, starting with the planning stage of the audit, where the auditor obtains an understanding of the client and its business and designs the audit plan, while paying careful attention to the audit risk model. The next two audit stages discussed at a general level include the conduct of audit procedures. Auditors can obtain various types of audit evidence to test the assertions (claims) made by management in the financial statements. The audit process concludes with the completion stage of the audit. By examining audit evidence obtained during an audit, auditors ultimately decide which type of auditor?s report to issue. We also devote significant attention throughout the course on the audit profession?s need for ethical behavior and professional skepticism, as well as the auditor's role and responsibilities with respect to fraud. Throughout the course, students will be offered the opportunity of interacting with practice during audit firm visits, practice-based case studies and/or guest lectures by practitioners.

Aside from offering students a practice-based introduction to the auditing profession, students will also be exposed to the academic auditing discipline by reading a selection of academic audit research papers and discussing the importance of the findings for the auditing profession.

Contact hours listed under a course description may vary due to the combination of lecture-based and independent work required for each course therefore, CEA's recommended credits are based on the ECTS credits assigned by VU Amsterdam. 1 ECTS equals 28 contact hours assigned by VU Amsterdam.