Professional standards require the auditor to plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether caused by error or fraud. This EBPAQC tool was developed to assist members in the consideration of fraud in their employee benefit plan audits.
It contains examples of risk factors relating to the two types of fraud an auditor should consider:
Fraudulent financial reporting
Misappropriation of assets
Within each of these fraud types, risk factors are further classified based on the three conditions generally present when fraud exists:
Incentive/pressure to perpetrate fraud
Opportunity to carry out the fraud
Attitude/rationalization to justify the fraudulent action
Although the risk factors cover a broad range of situations, they are only examples and, accordingly, the engagement team may wish to consider additional or different risk factors. Not all examples are relevant in all circumstances, and some may be of greater or lesser significance in entities of different size or with different ownership characteristics or circumstances. The order of the examples is not intended to reflect their relative importance or frequency of occurrence.