Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, Second Edition

DEFINING AUDIT

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India (ICAI) has defined audit as ‘… the independent examination of any entity, whether profit oriented or not and irrespective of its size or legal form, when such an examination is conducted with a view to expressing an opinion thereon’.³ In other words, auditing is the process by which a competent independent person objectively obtains and evaluates evidence regarding assertions about an economic activity or event for the purpose of forming an opinion about and reporting on the degree to which the assertion conforms to an identical set of standards.