- We obtained an understanding of the legal and regulatory frameworks that are applicable to the company and determined that the most significant are those that relate to the reporting framework (FRS 102, the Companies Act 2006, the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) and the UK Corporate Governance Code) and the relevant tax compliance regulations in the UK. In addition, we concluded that there are certain significant laws and regulations which may have an effect on the determination of the amounts and disclosures in the
financial statements being the Bribery Act 2010, Occupational Health and Safety Regulations and the Data Protection Act.
- We understood how the company is complying with those frameworks by reading internal policies and codes of conduct and assessing the entity level control environment, including the level of oversight of those charged with governance. We corroborated our enquiries through review of correspondence with regulatory bodies. We designed our audit procedures to identify non-compliance with such laws and regulations identified in the paragraph above. As well as enquiry, our procedures involved a review of board meetings and other committee minutes to identify any non-compliance with laws and regulations. Our procedures also involved journal entry testing, with a focus on journals meeting our defined risk criteria based on our understanding of the business.
- We assessed the susceptibility of the company's financial statements to material misstatement, including how fraud might occur by considering the programs and controls that the company has established to address risks identified by the entity, or that otherwise prevent, deter and detect fraud; how senior management monitor those programs and controls evaluating conditions in the context of incentive/pressure to commit fraud, considering the opportunity to commit fraud and the potential rationalisation of the fraudulent act, and by making enquiries of senior management, including the Chief Financial Officer, Compliance Officer and Chief Executive Officer. We planned our audit to identify risks of management override, tested higher risk journal entries and performed audit procedures to address the potential for management bias, particularly over areas involving significant estimation.
- We communicated all relevant instances of non-compliance with laws and regulations identified so that we could design our audit procedures to respond.
Owing to the inherent limitations of an audit, there is an unavoidable risk that we may not have detected some material misstatements in the financial statements, even though we have properly planned and performed our audit in accordance with the auditing standards For example, the further removed non-compliance with laws and regulations (irregularities) is from the events and transactions reflected in the financial statements, the less likely the inherently limited procedures required by auditing standards would identify it. In addition, as with any audit, there remained a higher risk of non-detection of irregularities, as these may involve collusion, forgery, intentional omissions, misrepresentations, or the override of internal controls.
We are not responsible for preventing non-compliance and cannot be expected to detect non-compliance with all laws and regulations.