Federation Business School
BUACC5935: Auditing & Assurance
Services
Semester 2-2015
ASSIGNMENT
This assignment is to be completed in groups of three and comprises twenty per-cent of the marks for this course. There are four questions each worth five marks each (approx. 2000 words in total)
Assessment Criteria:
Student work will generally be assessed in terms of the following criteria:
1. Effectiveness of communication –i.e. readability, legibility, grammar, spelling, neatness, completeness and presentation will be a minimum threshold requirement for all written work submitted for assessment. Work that is illegible or incomprehensible and does not meet the minimum requirement will be awarded a fail grade.
2. Demonstrated understanding - This will be evidenced by the student's ability to be dialectical in the discussion of contentious issues.
3. Evidence of research - This will be evidenced by the references made to the statutes, auditing standards, books, journal articles and inclusion of a bibliography.
Note:
1. All written work must conform with the Federation University General Guide for the Presentation of Academic Work.
2. For all written work students must ensure that they submit their own original work. Any act of plagiarism will be severely penalised.
Plagiarism is presenting someone else work as your own and is a serious offence with serious consequences. As set out in the University Regulation 6.1.1, students who are caught plagiarising will, for a first offence, be given a zero mark for that task. A second offence will result in a failing grade for the course(s) involved and any subsequent offence will be referred to the Student Discipline Committee. Student must be aware of the University Regulation 6.1.1 Student Plagiarism.
Students must:
• fully reference the source(s) of all material, even if you have re-expressed the ideas, facts or descriptions;
• acknowledge all direct quotations; and
• not submit work that has been researched and written by another person.
Question 1.
The origin of auditing goes back to times scarcely less remote than that of accounting… Whenever the advance of civilization brought about the necessity of one man being entrusted to some extent with the property of another the advisability of some kind of check upon the fidelity of the former would become apparent.
(Richard Brown (ed), A History of Accounting and Accountants, T.T. and E.C. Jack, 1905, page 75.)
Discuss in terms of how the principal-agent conflict depicted in agency theory, where principals lack reasons to trust their agents because of information asymmetries and differing motives, is critical to understanding the development of the audit over the centuries as well as its usefulness and purpose
Question 2.
Describe the lessons learnt by auditors in the aftermath of recent audit failures.
Question 3.
The history of ‘whistle-blowers’reveals few to have been auditors. Why is this so?

Question 4.
Discuss the following in terms of sufficient and appropriate audit evidence.