Chapter 1 An Introduction to Assurance and Financial Statement Auditing 5
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auditing valuable to you as a future accountant or business decision maker, whether or not you plan to become a financial statement auditor.
While the concepts and techniques you will learn in this book will be useful to you regardless of your career path, our experience is that students frequently fall into the trap of defining auditing in terms of memorized lists of rules, tools, and techniques. The study of auditing and the related concepts and techniques will make a lot more sense if you build your intuition of why audits are needed, if you understand the necessary characteristics of audits and auditors, and if you focus on what an auditor does, and why. Don’t fall into the trap of attempting to study auditing through rote memorization! Instead, pause frequently to be sure you understand both “what?” and “why?” as you study the concepts and techniques of audit- ing, as well as “how” auditing is carried out.
As you saw in the introduction to this chapter, reliable information is important for man- agers, investors, creditors, and regulatory agencies to make informed decisions. Auditing helps ensure that information is reliable, credible, and relevant. In fact, the assurance provided by auditing is vital to the proper functioning of our economic system!
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