ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY OF THE AUDITORS

Ethical Responsibility of the Auditors

Ethical Responsibility of the Auditors

Introduction

Every profession demands ethical responsibility from the people involved in it. Ethics is a code of conduct or behaviour that needs to be followed in order to fulfil the principles of the profession. Auditing is an expertise field that demands from the people involved in this profession to follow the guidelines that have been provided by the legal authorities. It is the responsibility of the people who are conducting auditing that by following the ethical principles of this profession they will highlight any illegal activity found in an organization and no bribery or money will be taken in order to hide the irregularities of a firm. The report will research on the ethical principles that need to be followed by the auditors, what measures need to be taken in order to ensure that all the ethics are followed, it will also find that how different Acts of Bribery and Money laundering have affected the auditors and what suggestions have been provided to learn things from these acts in order to completely fulfil the ethical responsibility.

Discussion

Auditing is an accounting tool that is used to ensure that the record keeping and development of financial statements is done in the most accurate and transparent manner. The auditing helps the firm in finding out the errors or mistakes in the accounting processes like recording, categorizing or etc. This job is performed by experts in this field who are performing the responsibility of auditing over many years. Today there are several auditing firms that conduct audit of the firms. There are three kinds of audits that are performed by the companies: internal audit, external audit and audit conducted by the government. Internal audits are performed by professionals who try to examine that all the business units in an organization are performing according to policies, procedures and goals set by the organization. Internal auditing also helps in finding out that the recording, reporting, categorization and generation of the financial statements are done according in an accurate manner. Internal audits are sometimes not reliable because it is performed by the employees of an organization. External auditing is a task that is assigned to specialized firms that conduct auditing practices. The main responsibility of the external auditing firms is to check that the financial statements or other financial data that has been published has been developed by using correct accounting measure, the data presented follow all the rules and regulations of accounting and the statements are presented with full honesty. The external auditors at the end of the auditing process generate auditing report expressing and giving comments about the maintenance of the accounts by a firm. The government audits are performed on timely basis in order to find out that the government institutions are performing accurately and that there are no fraudulent activities carrying on in the organizations.

According to Lere (2007) ethics and ethical behaviours are getting extremely important for the ...