Discussion

Week 2 Discussion
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
What is an audit (in the context of financial accounting)?
An audit is basically carried out to assess an individual, institution, system, process, organization, project or product. Audits are usually conducted to verify and ascertain the reliability of any given information and as such providing an evaluation of the internal control of the subject under audit. In the context of financial accounting, an audit represents an assessment of objectivity, in which the management of a firm presents its financial statements (Siegel et al, 2015). The auditor gives a report based on these results.
Can an audit ensure that fraud and theft are not present in the accounting system? Why or why not?
Definitely, audits play a critical role in ensuring that theft and fraud are not present in the accounting system. They act as anti-fraud mechanisms which are focused on the measures to detect and prevent fraud on time. Internal audits and internal controls are the core elements of these anti-fraud mechanisms.
What are some ways in which accounting for healthcare organizations (HCOs), especially not-for-profit (NFP) ones, tends to differ from accounting in other industries?
Accounting in health care organizations and especially non-profit ones differ from accounting in other industries in very many ways. The most important difference is the number and variety of the products that are produced by health care providers. HCOs provide quite a wide variety of products coming from one industry as compared to other industries (Cleverley, 2018).

Therefore, this large number of healthcare products and their diversity requires the combination of normative and empirical accounting techniques that are inherent in resource costing. The other notable difference in accounting between health organizations and organizations in other industries is that the healthcare industry is made up of quite a variety of enterprises that work together with the sole purpose of delivering health care services. Therefore most healthcare accounting systems are almost completely vertically integrated, unlike other industries where the enterprises are not even integrated at all.
References
Cleverley, W.O. & Cleverley, J.O. (2018). Essentials of Healthcare Finance (8th ed). Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning, LLC
Siegel, J. G., Shim, J. K., Dauber, N. A., & Qureshi, A. A. (2015). Accounting handbook.