Types of Assurance Services

Lesson Exercise Solution

Lesson:

Business representatives often make statements, either orally or written, that somehow relate to their businesses.

Unfortunately, not all people speak the truth. Whether by mistake or by intention, many statements aren't quite true.

That's why auditors are hired to give a third-party perspective. These auditors perform due diligence and provide a third-party assessment of the information put forth. This lends credibility to the information and provides confidences to users (such as investors, lenders, and governments) that the information is reliable.

There are three broad categories of assessment.

Assurance - The auditor examines information.
Attestation - The auditor examines managerial assertions
Auditing - The auditors focus on financial statements

If you think about it, auditing is a subset of attestation, and attestation is a subset of assurance.

One way to remember this is that the higher up (alphabetically) the term, the more specific the engagement's focus.

You're an auditor attempting to sell services to Juliet Corp. and want to make sure you use terminology correctly.

Here are the relevant facts:

you evaluated a firm's financial statements to determine if they were free from material misstatements.

What is the most specific category of service that would apply to this case?

Answer:

That engagement was an audit engagement.

Explanation:

That engagement was looking specifically at financial statements.

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