APPLICATION OF THE AUDIT PROCESS TO THE SALES AND COLLECTION CYCLE

MINI CASE STUDY

You are auditing the sales and collection cycle for the Alam Regional Hospital, a small not-for-profit hospital. The hospital has a reputation for excellent medical services and deficient record keeping. The medical people have a tradition of doing all aspects of their job correctly, but because of a shortage of accounting personnel, there is no time for internal verification or careful performance. In previous years, your CPA firms has found quite a few misstatements in billings, cash receipts and account receivable. As in all hospitals, the two largest assets are accounts receivable and property, plant and equipment.

The hospital has several large loans payable to local banks, and the two banks have told management that they are reluctant to extend more credit, especially considering the modern hospital that is being built in a nearby city. In the past, country taxes have made up deficits, but in the past year, the country has also been incurring deficits because of high unemployment.

In previous years, your response from patients to confirmation requests has been frustrating at best. The response rate has been extremely low, and those who did respond did not know the purpose of the confirmation or their account outstanding balance. You have had the same experience in confirming receivables at the other hospitals.

You conclude that control over cash is excellent and the likelihood of fraud is extremely small. You are less confident about unintentional errors in billing, recording sales, cash receipts, account receivables and bad debts.

1. Identify the major factors affecting client business risk and acceptable risk for this audit.
2. What inherent risks are you concerned about?
3. What risks would you considered to be significant risks?
4. For each of the following, explain whether you plan to emphasize the tests in the audit of the sales and collection cycle and give reasons:

1. Tests of controls
2. Substantive tests of transactions
3. Substantive analytical procedures
4. Tests of details of balances