AICPA releases Risk Assessment Guide

NEW YORK, Dec. 8, 2006 — The American Institute of CPAs has released an authoritative audit guide entitled AICPA Audit Guide — Assessing and Responding to Audit Risk in a Financial Statement Audit.

The guide is intended to help auditors better implement the eight new auditing standards (SASs 104-111) issued earlier this year that are commonly referred to as the Risk Assessment Standards.

The guide includes numerous illustrative examples, interpretative flowcharts, observations and suggestions. It is divided into three parts:

Part one consists of seven chapters to help auditors understand, plan for and implement the Risk Assessment Standards in performing the audit, as well as evaluating audit findings, audit evidence and control deficiencies.
Part two contains numerous additional resources, including a comparison of the new standards to the old standards, guidance on understanding internal control components, examples of conditions and events that may indicate risks of material misstatement, illustrative financial statement assertions and examples of substantive procedures, a section on assessing the severity of identified internal control deficiencies, examples of circumstances that may be control deficiencies, significant deficiencies, or material weaknesses, and suggestions for conducting inquiries.
Part three contains a comprehensive case study that illustrates the important points in the guide.

The guide is available for purchase at www.cpa2biz.com/risk.