Nowadays, many small business entities in the marketplace are looking for a cheaper way for the auditors to obtain the financial information. In order to reduce the auditing cost, some people mention that different levels of audit standards are needed. The article "An audit is an audit, or is it?", written by Phil Cowperthwaite on the CPA Magazine, talks about whether should the society pare down the audit standards or should the audit-lite exist and the importance of maintaining all audit standards at the same level. Phil primarily discusses different user expectations of an audit, include board members, creditors, and management. Phil illustrates his thoughts which the pared down of audit standards cannot meet people's desires, even it is cheaper for users to obtain the assurance for information. For board members, a complete audit will be more attractive in public interest than a pared down audit. Especially in micro entities, the management team is very small, so the independent assurance for information which is fairly represented by the auditors is very important. That assurance can help the prospective board members to decide whether to join a …show more content…
Auditing takes a combination of professional judgment and skepticism and knowledge of the rules, and procedures to perform a high-quality auditing. As an auditor, it is necessary for evaluating information by following the official criteria. Not all of the users know the details of auditing, so following the same criteria can help users to understand the information much easier and can reduce the expectation gap between users and auditors. Furthermore, auditing is a high-quality service. If the society decides to introduce the audit-lite, some of the lower standards audits cannot seem as a high-quality service because of the deduction of the audit claims make audit assurance for the information