Generally accepted auditing standards paper

Santiago Vasquez

ACC / 491

September 2014
Arlys Erickson

Generally Accepted Auditing Standards Paper

With ongoing accounting and bribery scandals worldwide much attention has been paid to the issue of global harmonization of generally accepted accounting principles over the past few years. To face these challenges in the US, the Auditing Standards Board (ASB) that is a division of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) promulgated the Generally Accepted Auditing Standards or GAAS. The GAAS refers to a set of systematic guidelines used by auditors while performing audits on companies’ financial statements, thus ensuring its accuracy, consistency, and verifiability (Morris, 2013). Hence, these standards provide the ground rules for conducting every audit in such a way that the auditor is able to properly express an opinion on a company’s financial statements giving reasonable assurance to stakeholders interested in those statements about whether (or not) these statements fairly present the company's financial condition. Audit Section 150 states that they are 10 principles divided in three main sections each littered with requirements that the subject company and auditor must meet: 3 General standards requiring that an auditor must have adequate technical training and proficiency, maintain independence and exercise due professional care, in order to properly perform any audit. Additionally, 3 standards of Fieldwork exist that involve the actual planning and performance of the audit, such as “the auditor must obtain sufficient appropriate audit evidence”. Last but not least there are 4 standards that apply to Reporting including statements that the auditor must include in any report such as “when the auditor determines that informative disclosures are not reasonably adequate, he