Professional Skepticism Today

Professional skepticism today

In this writing we will deal with different points of professional skepticism but to achieve this we must make known that it is skepticism in such a way that it is clear and specific in order to understand the best possible. Skepticism "state of mental rest by which we neither affirm nor deny", but if you examine carefully.

There are different organizations that define it with different concepts, Deloitte (2015) “an attitude that includes a state of alert to the conditions that may indicate a possible error due to fraud or mistake, making a critical evaluation of audit evidence”.

On the other hand, the PCAOB Standard () defines it as an inquisitive mind and critical thinking these are two important criteria for professional skepticism. What do we mean with inquisitive mind and critical thinking? For example, in the audit field, information is expected to be analyzed especially that which contradicts another or simply a conflict is waiting for the auditor to go and do more work in that specific field or when there is a problem to obtain evidence of audit Enough and adequate, another example that can be used to clarify is the risk of fraud in this situation, professional skepticism is essential because if it does not take them into account, the audit would simply not be good and the quality and credibility of the This exercise. It should be noted that it is not acceptable for the auditor to take the evidence presented by management, it is necessary that it review the information completely according to the SICs (International Accounting Standards).

In addition this tells us about a balance that must exist in the auditor since if he is too skeptical it is a problem and if it is not skeptical we will also face a difficulty.

Why this? Because auditors must have efficient and efficiency two similar terms but with different concepts, being very skeptical, a lot of unnecessary information could be collected and therefore it would cease to be efficient.

But as this balance of professional skepticism can be achieved personally I have the theory that this can be given as time passes and more experience is being obtained as an auditor and thus be holding what is the percentage of proper skepticism. Other people tend to say that it cannot be instilled and that it is very difficult to teach it because of the fact that it is a feature of the person individually. This has not yet been clarified but when talking about acceptable skepticism refers to a good quality audit.

This broad and complex area of ​​the audit are specific characteristic that must be taken into account as the ease of communication to be able to explain the procedures in the best way, be a very analytical person in order to understand problems and failures found. But the most representative as such of skepticism is the ability to distrust the client? This is focused as it has been mentioned earlier to the documents that are delivered to the Auditor by the Management the Company or, failing that, the happy client is very important, it is very important that the auditor be independent and has as much objectivity and its own criteria because in many Occasions could be given misleading evidence and this is where the professional skepticism of the accounting auditor is shown.

ACCA- 2008 () states that skepticism is related to the quality of the audit and not only this association has that concept but also coincides with research based on Eining, Plumlee and Hurtt experiments where they detected that auditors with lower degree of skepticism they had more errors and lower audit quality contrary to auditors with a greater degree of skepticism.

Subsequently, it can be said that everything said and specified about professional skepticism is important It relates to ethics generating more probability that the skeptical auditor is governed by good ethics, waiting for it to be an entire person in every sense of the word.

Now, if this professional skepticism in the audit is so important because not everyone takes it into account and exercises it as it should, there are several reasons why this does not happen according to IFLAR 2016 () starting due to the lack of accountability and following that in certain cases the auditors are not able to challenge management especially with estimates to calculate any provision or other estimate.

Another reason as PCAOB 2017 mentions () is the non -evaluation of the rationability of this information delivered by the company, the new thing that is happening is that there is something called skeptical mentality and skeptical attitude in both there is an interaction but the skeptical mentality normally seeks The information and then evaluates it, integrates it and subsequently begins to think of it in total are three stages on the other hand the skeptical attitude consists of the author’s opinion, what he feels and its criteria on the risk, which evidences can be collected and which must be used. But they are still interacting together.

Concluding it can be estimated that many points are missing to investigate and clarify but still we can try to improve professional skepticism with aspects such as; What type of verification will we use, what kind of evidence we will collect, what effort and with what effort we are going to exercise. In order to provide good audit quality, regarding this, auditors need to be aware and create a space of trust and credibility to our profession and the world of finance