The Chief Financial Officer of your client is concerned

 Assignment Scenario:

The Chief Financial Officer of your client is concerned that a member of the payable group is living

beyond his means and that the pattern of payments in this department does not correlate to that of

previous years. He has asked your audit team to perform a special review of the AP system to look for

any irregularities.

Purchase/payment fraud is one of the more common types of fraud in an organization. Many frauds in this

area involve the manipulation of the payment information — for example, the creation in the ledger of a

fictitious supplier, or reactivating a dormant account. Particularly vulnerable are miscellaneous accounts.

However, you must not overlook fraud perpetrated on a genuine supplier’s account with or without the

supplier’s collusion.

Many purchasing systems are complex with automatic re-ordering so that once a supplier has been set up

and a requisition input, payment will be processed automatically. Staff may also be in collusion with

suppliers to commit fraud by receiving gifts or kickbacks for additional business, by paying invoices on

more favorable terms than other suppliers, or as per the organization’s policy on payments. Also,

employees may exceed ordering and payment authorization levels by splitting invoices or payments

below authorization thresholds.

This assignment covers the types of tests one might perform when testing AP and looking for fraud, using

IDEA. The following auditing plan as a roadmap through this assignment:

Assignment

Item

IDEA Workbook

Exercises

General Description of Task

3 3A Open IDEA and create a Managed project for Accounts Payable.

4 - 6 3B – 3D Import and agree the Accounts Payable data.

a) Import the Accounts Payable transactions,

b) Import the Authorized Suppliers detail,

c) Compute field statistics,

d) Select a control total field for each database, and

e) Use Discover to identify trends within the data.

7 3E Analyze the profile of the number and value of payments by the numeric band

to identify any unusual trends and to extract high-value amounts.

8 3F Identify high and unusual amounts.

9 - 10 3G Identify further unusual payments from previous analyses, including:

a) "CASH" in Payee name,

b) Round sum amounts,

c) Payments authorized by HMV, and

d) Payments made on a Sunday.

11 3H Test for duplicate payments and vendors/payees.

12 3I Test for completeness by testing for gaps in the check number sequence.

Skipped 3J Identify working days on which no payments were processed.

13 3K Analyze payment terms and ensure that the client’s payment policy

has been followed.

14 3L Test the validity of payments to authorized suppliers.

15 3M Analyze payments per supplier to identify significant changes from the

previous year’s total.

Assignment 7: IDEA Assignment #2: Accounts Payable

2

Despite your success on the AR project, your audit manager, Michelle Gwen Smith (MGS for short),

knows that you are still pretty new to IDEA. As such, she has given you one of her old training

workbooks with detailed instructions on how to carry out the requirements of this assignment. She was

even kind enough to go through the workbook over the weekend and added a few notes that should help

you complete your assignment. However, she has also blocked out some information to ensure you can

draw your own conclusions.

1) Review the potential risks and their associated audit objectives associated with the Accounts

Payable cycle. In a few sentences (at least two, no more than four) describe in your own words

the primary risks that one faces when auditing and examining the Accountants Payable cycle.

2) Review the tests for which IDEA is well suited in the AP cycle, as well as the example data

request form for obtaining AP data from a client.

3) If you have not already done so, follow the instruction in section 3A of the IDEA workbook and

create a new managed project in IDEA for the AP work. Name the project and the answer sheet

you submit AP_2018_YourLastName_YourFirstName.

NOTE: Be sure that you have set-up the G Drive folder, and that you have linked IDEA to the

folder on the G Drive. Otherwise, you risk losing your work when you exit the virtual desktop.

Instructions for setting up the folders, and finding/changing the IDEA default save location are in

Blackboard.

4) Now that the AP project is created, you need to bring in the data from the client. To do that, work

through Exercises 3B and 3C. After completing the import of both files, take a screenshot for

audit documentation purposes. It needs to show both the record count per payments file, in “File

Explorer” window on the left, and the control total of AMOUNT per the payment files via the

“Properties” window on the right. I’ve included an example from another client below. Delete the

example, including the arrows and boxes, and replace it with the one from this client. As a check

figure, your record count should be 999, and the summed value of the AMOUNT should be

$34,145,300.89. If you have these figures, great job, keep going, if not something has gone wrong

and needs to be fixed before moving on with the assignment.