The auditors' way to acquire knowledge about a company's environment

Abstract

The purpose with this study is to identify and explore how auditors proceed when acquiring knowledge about a company’s environment; and which difficulties that arise when acquiring this knowledge. A qualitative research method has been used to do this study and eight auditors have been interviewed.

The risks in a company depend on which industry the company operates within. Therefore, it is very important that an auditor has an understanding of the whole company. ISA 315 requires an auditor to have an understanding of a company and its environment. This understanding will affect the auditor’s risk assessments during audit process.

This study shows that interviews with the clients is an important information source when the auditors want to have knowledge about a company’s environment. Other information sources the auditors in this study use are different media sources, colleagues and key ratios. One difficulty with acquiring knowledge about a company’s environment is according to the respondents that it is hard to get a whole picture of a company. Another difficulty is that it might be hard for the auditors to know when they have enough information about a company’s environment; information that makes it possible to do accurate risk assessments.