Applications of Statistical Methods and Techniques to Auditing and Accounting

摘要

The paper reviews a number of statistical methods and techniques that are applied in auditing. First, a brief introduction is made into what auditing means, how it works, and when statistics come in. In the subsequent sections it goes in to: testing and estimation procedures, leading to decision rules used by auditors to determine their sample sizes, and leading to techniques to estimate the population quality from the sample results; methods to ascertain a stipulated quality of a population if errors found during the statistical procedure can be corrected; the methodological question how to use information about the population quality that is gained preliminary to the drawing of the sample. It presents a Bayesian model to overcome the well-known drawbacks of the audit assurance model which is used by many auditors.