Introduction:

Audit emerges because society needed. Auditing has been a regular feature of
organized human activity from the earliest times. Indeed evidence suggests that
formal audit procedures existed in the economic activities of the most of the early
civilization. With the advancement of development, audit emerges as a separate
discipline & contributes to the economic & social advancement. Audits serve a
vital economic purpose and play an important role in serving the public interest to
strengthen accountability and reinforce trust and confidence in financial reporting.
As such, audits help enhance economic prosperity, expanding the variety, number
and value of transactions that people are prepared to enter into. However, in recent
years, and in the light of corporate scandals, we have witnessed ongoing global
demands for improvements in audit quality. Changes have been taken place to
promote greater transparency in the audit and accountability in auditors but there
are continuing demands for further improvements to be made.

Definition of audit:
Audit is an independent examination of books of accounts, other documents,
stores, assets etc relating to receipts and expenditure of an entity with a view to
ensure
that rules and orders framed by competent authority in regard to
financial matters have been followed;
that expenditure has been incurred with due regularity and propriety;
that assets have been properly utilized and safeguarded;
that resources have been used economically, efficiently and effectively; and
that the accounts truly represent the fact.

Auditing refers to a systematic process of objectively obtaining and evaluating

evidence regarding assertions about economic actions and events to ascertain the
degree of correspondence between those assertions and established criteria and
communicating the results to interested users.
-American Accounting Association (AAA)