What is Audit programme or Audit program?

First things first audit programme or audit program refers to one and the same thing. Audit programme is used in British English whereas Audit program is used in American english. However, audit program can also mean some auditing software but here I will be discussing this term in relation to auditing and what is its purpose.

Most of the time audit is conducted by a team instead of just an individual. If business is small or if there is not much to be done then it might be possible to conduct the whole engagement easily by an individual. But usually amount of work, time constraints and other factors require the audit engagement to be conducted by more then one person.

Depending on the audit, audit team can have different number of members. Usually the team is structured in a Partner, Manager and Assistants which may further be divided into senior assistants and juniors.

In order to properly assign work to each individual and what is required to be done by whom there must be some kind of an instructions set otherwise, more than one members might be auditing the same area or in other case some areas are left completely unaudited.

To ensure efficient and effective conduct of audit assignment, audit programmes or audit programs are used.

Audit programme contains step by step instructions to be carried out by team members i.e. it is simply a list of audit procedures to be executed by team members.

Even though audit programme sets out the whole agenda for every member of the team but the main users are juniors for whom it acts as a dictation to be followed. The main purpose of audit programme is that every material area has been audited appropriately and sufficient appropriate audit evidence has been obtained in respect of every important areas of audit.

Audit programmes are prepared on the basis of audit plan usually by the auditor – who in the audit team is either partner or manager. But sometimes, audit firms haveĀ  a basic audit programme and the same is used by the auditor after making some modifications to it to make it according the audit engagement in hand.

Mostly it is in the form of a checklist which can be used by the juniors to make sure every required procedure has been implemented. This can also help in monitoring the work of juniors in specific or assistants in general.

Audit programmes may be laid down in advance for the whole year for some aspects of the audit which auditor expects to be auditing after regular intervals of time or when needed. For understandability and convenience, audit programmes are written for each audit area separately and then assigned to specific team members.

What procedures shall be part of audit programme is to be decided by the auditor and depends on the auditor’s judgement.

Sample audit programme is as follows:

Important
Audit programme or audit program is not a name of any computer program. Also it has nothing to do with computer programming in any way. However, audit programmes can be made using computer software in computer assisted auditing environment.

1 COMMENT

  1. which international auditing standard is the audit proggrame

Comments are closed.