Our objectives are to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements as a whole are free from material misstatement, whether due to fraud or error, and to issue an auditor's report that includes our opinion. Reasonable assurance is a high level of assurance, but is not a guarantee that an audit conducted in accordance with ISAs (UK) will always detect a material misstatement when it exists. Misstatements can arise from fraud or error and are considered material if, individually or in the aggregate, they could reasonably be expected to influence the economic decisions of users taken on the basis of these financial statements.
The extent to which our procedures are capable of detecting irregularities, including fraud is detailed below:
We obtained an understanding of the legal and regulatory frameworks that are applicable to the company and determined
that the most significant are United Kingdom Accounting Standards, UK Companies Act 2006 and tax legislation (governed by
HM Revenue and Customs).
Audit procedures performed by the engagement team included:
- Understanding the nature of the industry and sector;
- Understanding the management's internal controls designed to prevent and detect irregularities;
- Reviewing relevant meeting minutes;
- Testing transactions using substantive procedures;
- Identifying and testing journal entries, in particular any journal entries posted with unusual account combinations.
Our audit testing might include testing complete populations of certain transactions and balances, possibly using data auditing techniques. However, it typically involves selecting a number of items for testing, rather than testing complete populations.
We will often seek to target particular items for testing based on their size or risk characteristics. In other cases, we will use audit sampling to enable us to draw a conclusion about the population from which the sample is selected.
There is inherent limitation in the audit procedures described above. The risk of detecting a material misstatement due to fraud is higher than the risk of not detecting one results from error, as fraud may involve deliberate concealment by, for example, forgery or intentional misrepresentations, or through collusion.
A further description of our responsibilities for the audit of the financial statements is located on the Financial Reporting Council's website www.frc.org.uk/auditorsresponsibilities. This description forms part of our auditor's report.