Читать книгу Financial Accounting For Dummies - Maire Loughran - Страница 80

The Auditing Standards Board (ASB) is a senior technical committee of the AICPA. The ASB issues the standards and procedures that financial accountants must follow when conducting attestation and audit services for nonpublic companies. It also sets quality control standards to use when conducting peer reviews, which occur when one CPA firm evaluates the operations of another CPA firm.

The ASB has 19 members, most of whom work for public accounting firms (such as KPMG LLP), are university professors, are governmental accountants, or otherwise work in the field of accounting. Members serve one- to three-year terms and are jointly nominated by the director of the AICPA Audit and Attest Standards staff and the ASB chair. The responsibility of approving the nominations falls to the AICPA Board of Directors.

Curious about these mysterious ASB standards? They are called Statements on Auditing Standards (SAS), and as of this writing the AICPA website lists 143 of them. Here, I explain just a couple so you have some idea of what they cover:

 SAS No. 1 Section 410 says the auditor must state whether the financial statements are presented using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP).

 SAS No. 143 defines the responsibilities the auditor has regarding accounting estimates and the related disclosures (see Chapter 15).

A lot of information about the ASB standards and procedures is available free of charge on the AICPA website at www.aicpa.org. From the home page, select “Research” and then “Standards.” You can access all sorts of good financial accounting info on the topics of audit, attest, compilation, and review standards.

A compilation occurs when an outside financial accountant prepares financial statements for a company using only data given to him by company management. A review occurs when the financial accountant gives limited assurance that no material modifications need to be made to financial statements prepared by company management.