I Like Accounting

Inventory errors and their effects

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Sometimes there are errors when it comes to inventory management.

Often, it's just an accident. Some bit of inventory might have been forgotten in a different warehouse or while in transit.

Maybe there's so much of it that managers just made estimates of what they had.

If only it were that easy. Did you know that some people will intentionally misstate their inventory levels to make their companies look better or worse than they really are?

That's called fraud.

Usually people commit fraud to make their businesses look more efficient than they are. They do this by making it reducing the amount of inventory that they claim to have used to make the profit they did in that quarter.

Question Michael Lopez, owner of Harvey Co., is worried that his reported inventory levels might be wrong, so he hired some expensive auditors to find out what really happened.
  • $64 of inventory was incorrectly subtracted to the books at the end of the period.

What does this mean for the cost of goods sold (COGS) and net income values?
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