LASA 1: Reporting Requirements

Dewey, Wright, and Moore have just been approached by a new client, AV Imports and Exports, a company that trades goods with various countries. You are in charge of an audit engagement.

AV Imports and Exports is a publicly traded company that does several billions of dollars of business every year. As partner at Dewey, Wright, and Moore, you understand the ramifications of the audit of a company of this size. Regulation is stringent, and the impact on the firm, as well as on the society, can be substantial if the audit fails.

As you have interns and first year staff assisting you with this audit, it is important that they are educated on the risk, the regulation that governs the audit, as well as both the client and firm conducting the audit. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) are the major regulators of concern. To educate your staff on regulation and importance of conducting the audit properly, you instruct them to do the following exercise.

Visit the PCAOB Web site (http://www.pcaobus.org/) and the U.S. SEC Web site (http://www.sec.gov/). Review the reporting requirements for publicly traded companies, including Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) requirements. Analyze the impact of the reporting requirements on the auditing profession.

In an 8-10 page paper, respond to the following:

• Explain how PCAOB and SEC have benefited the investor.
• Evaluate whether more regulation is required.
• Use the Argosy University online library resources to locate a case covering a CPA firm or public accounting firm involved in an audit failure. Explain whether or not you feel professional standards were appropriately applied in this case. Present the information in such a way that your staff can understand the significance of always maintaining the highest in professional standards.
• The overall risk assessment is now complete. As a part of planning the audit, you need to select an appropriate audit strategy for obtaining sufficient evidence for each significant financial statement assertion. The strategies are based on the interrelationships among evidence, materiality, and the components of audit risk.
  Define the term preliminary audit strategy.
• Summarize information about preliminary audit strategy from scholarly sources and cite the sources.
• Describe the components that should be specified in developing a preliminary audit strategy for your client and explain how the strategy relates to the audit risk model.

Give reasons for your assertions and format your paper in APA. You should have at least 6 outside sources in addition to your textbook and websites given above.