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Auditing, Attestation, and Assurance Services

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Auditing, Attestation, and Assurance Services
ACC491

Auditing, Attestation, and Assurance Services This paper discusses and analyzes three different services provided by Certified Public Accountants (CPAs), namely: auditing, attestation, and assurance services. Surprisingly, assurance service is the broadest term among three. It includes auditing and attestation services. The most commonly heard service, auditing, is the narrowest service that a CPA firm provides. The attestation service lies in between auditing and assurance. Each of these services is valuable to the public and the clients requesting these services. For each service, the team will first give a definition, and provide an example of each service. Team C also discusses who would use these types of services as well as the reason behind doing so. Finally, the team will provide some research about what standards apply to each service and what organization establishes them.
Auditing
Auditing is “a systematic process of objectively obtaining and evaluating evidence regarding assertions about economic actions and events to ascertain the degree of correspondence between those assertions and established criteria and communicating the results to interested users” (Boynton & Johnson, 2006, p. 6). An example of auditing is auditing a company’s financial statements. “ A financial statement audit involves obtaining and evaluating evidence about an entity’s presentation of its financial position, results of operations, and cash flows for the purpose of expressing an opinion on whether they are presented fairly in conformity with established criteria—usually generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP)” (Boynton & Johnson, 2006, p. 8). Security Exchange Commission (SEC) demands every public company to be audited annually. Local, state, and federal governments are also required to be audited.

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