You have been asked by your firm to examine the payment vouchers of a company to establish the level of errors and then decide whether...

      

You have been asked by your firm to examine the payment vouchers of a company to establish the level of errors and then decide whether better results can be obtained through statistical techniques.
Required:
a) State the steps you would take in order to test the vouchers for the errors.
b) Why is it not satisfactory to pick vouchers from a limited period?
c) State under what circumstances statistical sampling is a good technique

  

Answers


Wilfred
a) In order to test the vouchers for errors, I would;
i. Cast the figures in the vouchers in order to determine their arithmetical accuracy.
ii. Compare the current year‘s payments against the previous year‘s and investigate any unfavourable variance or difference.
iii. I would trace the payment vouchers to the ledger accounts to ensure no payment was left out in the vouching.
iv. I would inspect the payment voucher for authorization by the responsible official. I would expect authorization to be evidenced by a signature or stamp.
v. I would inspect the documents underlying the payment voucher such as the goods received note.
vi. I would carry out a sequence check on the payment voucher to establish the completeness of the vouchers. Any cancelled or spoilt vouchers should be accounted for.

b) It is not satisfactory to pick vouchers from a limited period as these vouchers may not be representative of all the vouchers that were raised in that period. This is because these vouchers may relate to payments that are subjected to special conditions or conditions that were not prevalent in the company throughout the period, e.g. there could have been a different accountant recording the payments made via those vouchers different people giving authority etc.

c) Statistical sampling is ideal in the following conditions:-
i) The population to be tested must be homogenous i.e. it must consist of items of the same kind, subject to the same level of audit risk.
ii) The population must be fairly large, otherwise the benefits of the technique will not be achieved. Statistical techniques need to be adjusted to work on small populations.
iii) Expectation of error must be low – i.e. control risk must have already been assessed as less than high (i.e. ICS is strong). High control risk requires impractically large sample sizes.
iv) The items in the population must be easily identifiable once selected so that checking of the items is easily carried out e.g. Items such as invoices must be pre-numbered and filed in sequence.
Wilfykil answered the question on February 21, 2019 at 10:41


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