Firm Quality Control

With a wide resource of industry contacts, services available for CPA firms include:

• Pre-issuance reviews (engagement quality control reviews) of non-public entities;

• Performing draft financial statement preparation and getting your client in a condition to be audited or reviewed which may involve cleaning up and adjusting books and records, identifying possible high risk areas and internal control weaknesses and preparing preliminary working papers to avoid independence issues and more efficient(and possibly more profitable) audits and reviews;

• Support in litigation for your firm or client and in responding to regulatory inquiries (DOL, Inspectors General Office, AICPA) including expert witness testimony; and

• Staff training.

Auditors and accountants face the possibility of lawsuits, regulator inquiries, restatements and client complaints when performing attest and accounting services. I have significant experience performing investigations and reviews of financial statements, working papers and books and records and most of the time the issues were caused by a misunderstanding of applicable standards, improper risk assessment, inadequate documentation and/or inadequate firm quality controls. It is certainly understandable with the volume of rules we are expected to exercise; small and medium firms don’t have the resources to allocate staff to mastering specific rules and often don’t realize that standards exist to apply to a situation.