The revaluation of non-current assets has become an accepted accounting practice in many countries including the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. This practice has implications for the external auditor who must decide whether to accept a valuation as reasonable and how much evidence to collect to support the decision. This thesis represents the first study to examine audit decision making in this area. Because of the absence of prior research, a series of structured interviews was undertaken with audit partners to identify the main audit issues. The results of these interviews, together with the relevant literature, were used to identify some of the factors that may impact on audit judgments concerning revalued assets. Hypotheses were developed and two complementary experiments were designed to test them. These were based on the premise that client management may be motivated to revalue in order to improve the appearance of the balance sheet, thereby increasing the inherent risk of misstatement. A 2 x 2 between-subjects design was used for both experiments, and the dependent variables measured were estimates of the planned audit hours to be spent on the revalued assets and likelihood judgments that the valuations would be accepted as reasonable. Experiment One considered the situation where auditors are faced with two conflicting risks which are likely to exist simultaneously in the audit environment. These were the threat of litigation arising from the client's breach of a debt covenant and the risk of losing the client. The study examined auditors' responses to high and low levels of these risks on the audit of revalued owner-occupied property and an investment property. For the planned audit hours, results indicated a strong interaction effect between the two factors, with auditors planning to spend significantly more time on the audit of revalued assets when both the risk of breaching a debt covenant was high and the risk of losing the client was low. Similar results were found for the likelihood judgment that the valuations would be accepted as reasonable, except that for the investment property the results were only marginally significant. Experiment Two examined the impact of a proposal to issue shares to the public and the competence of the independent valuer on the audit of four classes of non-current assets. Results indicated that auditors would plan to spend longer on the audit of revalued assets when the client proposed to make a share issue and also when the competence of the valuer was lower. They were also less likely to accept the valuations as reasonable in these cases. However, an interaction effect between class of asset and competence of the valuer indicated that concern with some aspects of the evidence could override subjects' sensitivity to the competence of the valuer. An additional finding was a significant experience effect for the likelihood judgments, based on the number of audits, in which subjects had been involved, that had included asset revaluations. More experienced subjects were more likely than less experienced subjects to accept the valuations as reasonable.

Fraud risk assessment is an important audit process that has a direct impact on the effectiveness of auditors' fraud detection in an audit. However, prior literature has shown that auditors are generally poor at assessing fraud risk. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) suggests that auditors may improve their fraud risk assessment performance by adopting a fraud specialist mindset. A fraud specialist mindset is a special way of thinking about accounting records. While auditors think about the company's recorded transactions in terms of the availability of supporting documentations and the authenticity of the audit trail, fraud specialists think instead of accounting records in terms of the authenticity of the events and activities that are behind the reported transactions. Currently there is no study that has examined the effects of the fraud specialist mindset on auditors' fraud risk assessment performance. In addition, although recent studies have found that fraud specialists are more sensitive than auditors in discerning fraud risk factors in situation where a high level of fraud risk is present, it remains unclear whether the same can be said for situation where the risk of fraud is low. Thus, the purpose of my dissertation is to examine the effects of fraud specialist and audit mindsets on fraud risk assessment performance. In addition, I examined such effects on fraud risk assessment performance in both high and low fraud risk conditions. The contributions of my dissertation include being the first to experimentally examine how different mindsets impact fraud-related judgment. The results of my study have the potential to help address the PCAOB's desire to improve auditors' fraud risk assessment performance though the adoption of the fraud specialist mindset. In addition, my study contributes to the literature by exploring fraud-related problem representation as a possible mediator of mindset on fraud risk assessment performance. I executed my dissertation by conducting an experiment in which mindset (fraud specialist or audit) was induced prior to the completion of an audit case (high or low in fraud risk). A total of 85 senior-level accounting students enrolled in two separate auditing classes participated in my study. The results from my experimental provide empirical support that it is possible to improve auditors' fraud risk assessment through adapting the fraud specialist mindset. My study also provides preliminary evidence that individuals with the fraud specialist mindset developed different problem representations than those with the audit mindset.

The thesis is focused on the audit of the financial statements especially to the part of assets. The theoretical part describes the general characteristics of the audit, specifies selected areas of financial statement audit and defines accounting issues of fixed assets and inventory. The second part describes application process of auditing activities in a field of assets in a particular company. From the identified deficiencies are suggested recommendations which are focused to inventory valuation and depreciation of fixed assets.

The economic prosperity of the late 1990s was characterized by a perceived expansive growth that increased the expectations of a company's performance. WorldCom, a telecommunications company, was a victim of these expectations that led to the evolution of a fraud designed to deceive the public until the economic outlook improved. Through understanding what led to the fraud, how the fraud grew, and what its effects were, lessons can be derived to gain a better understanding of the reasons behind a fraud and to prevent future frauds from occurring or growing as big as the WorldCom fraud did.

網路環境中，電子商務上的帳務稽核系統，需要內部控制與內部稽核機制的輔助；尤其是在科技快速發展的今日，沒有人能保證百分百的安全，當安全的環境產生漏洞後，需要有一道最後的防線來偵測環境的漏洞，以減少公司的損失，Olden[2000] 認為稽核(Auditing)是網路環境下，電子商務安全基礎建設(Security Infrastructure)中最重要的功能，此稽核的工作包括：(1)促使公司追蹤網站上的活動。(2)產生交易日誌及相關的安全事件。(3)利用稽核日誌以證明某一活動或交易的執行，並且可以追蹤與重新建立因為安全入侵或詐欺等受到影響的事件。因此需要一個網路環境帳務稽核日誌系統，以利後續的審計軌跡的追蹤與查核。本研究試著提出適合在網路環境交易上的帳務稽核日誌系統架構，以解決網路環境交易上帳務稽核的需求，提供一個容易瞭解的稽核方式，幫助管理者更容易掌握網路上的相關問題，並且加以改進。對於日誌的稽核方面，提出重要的整體檢驗概念：(1)個別系統異常的檢查及異常的交互核對，以便找出不易發現的錯誤。(2)應用系統使用者主管角色檢查，以防止內部控制不當的缺失。 　在系統雛型建置上，由於各系統所產生的日誌並非為了帳務稽核之目的而設計，難免無法完全滿足帳務稽核日誌所需要的欄位，尤其是無法支援由任一日誌交叉查詢至其他三種日誌所需要的欄位，及受限於研究資源及時間的限制，在雛型系統的實作上，本研究只實作當交易日誌找出異常資料時，再交叉查詢到其他三種日誌。同時，因為重點是放在交叉查詢的檢查，為了減少資料量，因此交易日誌的檢查只舉出經過簡化的十個例子來示範。 / It is hard to implement perfect safe systems in network environment for electronic commerce, so we need internal control and audit mechanism to help detecting unsafe events or error events. Olden[2000] claims that auditing is one of the most critical functions of an e-commerce security infrastructure. The auditing component, which enables an organization to track a Website's activities, should generate logs of transactions and relevant security events. Audit logs serve as proof that an activity or transaction was performed. The logs are often the best way to track and recreate events leading to a security breach or fraudulent activities. In an effective e-commerce security infrastructure, every activity should automatically generate a log entry that can be accessed later. In this study, an implementation model of accounting auditing log system in network environment is proposed. It is essential for the auditing log system to integrate with, and leverage, existing technologies and environment platform logs for finding critical errors. The system should also perform user role conflict check for finding lack of user internal control. This research implemented a prototype system (Network Accounting Auditing log system, NAA) in the environment of NT windows and SQL server database system, in which NT system log, IIS log, FTP log, SQL server log, program maintenance log, five logs are assumed to be kept. For simplification, only 10 scenarios are checked whether there are any abcdrmal transaction events. If any abcdrmal event is found, the NAA system will further cross-check the above logs to find the possible reasons.

No description available.

The regulatory framework of many countries allows the upward revaluation of assets. Previous studies on the association of asset revaluation and future performance in Australia (Barth and Clinch, 1998), U.K. (Aboody, Barth and Kasznik, 1999) and Hong Kong (Jaggi and Tsui, 2001) have shown that upward asset revaluations are positively associated with the firm’s operating performance, suggesting that asset revaluations are value relevant. This study extends the previous research by focusing on the New Zealand environment with recent data to examine the association of upward asset revaluation and future operating performance. There is no obvious evidence indicating that upward revaluations are associated with operating performance in New Zealand. Our market assessments show that current year asset revaluations are related to share prices and returns, but are not statistically significant.

Society is increasingly calling for organisations to demonstrate corporate social responsibility (CSR). To fulfil this demand, organisations need to be accountable, democratic and transparent to their stakeholders. This can be achieved using a number of tools including communication about the environmental, social and economic impacts of an organisation’s actions and activities. Yet despite the importance of communicating environmental information, and society’s heightened environmental awareness, organisations are still demonstrating an insufficient commitment to environmental reporting, continuing their reluctance to be open and accountable about their environmental impacts. This suggests organisations currently have little understanding of why they should report, what they should report and/or how they should report. For environmental reporting progress to be achieved it is important that we have knowledge of how various factors influence voluntary environmental reporting engagement. This research, in contributing to and extending the body of environmental reporting knowledge, aims to provide an understanding of the Why, What and How of voluntary environmental reporting by specifically examining: why organisations should, and why organisations do, voluntarily report environmental information; what environmental information organisations should, and what environmental information organisations do, voluntarily report; and how organisations should, and how organisations do, voluntarily report environmental information. In using a combination of research methodologies this research extends prior CSR reporting studies – closing the gap between voluntary environmental reporting practice and theory, providing better insights into the underlying reasons and motivations for voluntary environmental reporting, and providing improved knowledge of the considerations made by companies as part of the voluntary environmental reporting process. In doing so, this research presents a more recent examination of voluntary environmental reporting in the annual reports of New Zealand and Australian publicly listed companies. Aspects of voluntary environmental reporting that have not been extensively examined before, particularly in Australasia, are examined. These include a focus on content-quality (as opposed to reporting quantity), an investigation of the effect of public pressure (using a combination of three proxy measures), and, through the use of qualitative research, an expansion of the insights obtained from quantitative data. This research finds that New Zealand and Australian publicly listed companies continue to have an insufficient and incorrect understanding of why they should report, what they should report and/or how they should voluntarily report environmental information. This deficient understanding results in voluntary environmental reporting in their annual reports which is inadequate – the reporting lacks meaning and purpose (i.e. has form but little or no substance), and reflects managers’ incorrect perceptions about the environmental impact of their company’s actions and activities. As a result voluntary environmental reporting in the annual reports of New Zealand and Australian publicly listed companies fails to “… give an understanding, which is not misleading, …” of the environmental consequences of an organisation’s actions and activities (adapted from Alexander & Jermakowicz, 2006, p. 132), providing little accountability to stakeholders, and serving neither external stakeholders nor those reporting well. As the demand for organisations to demonstrate accountability to stakeholders continues to increase over time it is important to develop informed environmental reporting guidance and undertake further examinations of the Why, What and How of environmental reporting.

The purpose of this thesis is to prepare the audit of the financial statements of DELTA, a. s., focusing in particular on long-term assets. The selected company deals with the processing and sale of wood, and the supply of foundries and steelworks with ferro-alloys and metals. The default information for the procedure and making audit of the financial statements is the theoretical and analytical part of the thesis, which is then based in the practical part, where are applied selected audit procedures in field of long-term assets and suggested specific recommendations for the company.