Regnskabsmanipulation

Abstract

This thesis aims to answer the question whether accounting manipulation can be prevented with effectivecontrol and whether it can be expected that the auditors detect the frauds. The thesis describes whyaccounting manipulation happens with the fraud triangle. It also describes the management’s role in a firmthrough legislations. When discussing the internal control’s impact on preventing accounting manipulation,it is important to discuss the advantages and disadvantage with use of the COSO frameworks. Theexpectation gap is used to determine the responsibilities of the auditor in a situation with fraud in a firm andthe international standards on auditing are used to clarify which actions the auditor should do in case ofauditing a firm’s financial statements.Three events of fraud are described and analysed within the reviewed theories. The analyses use the theories,legislations and regulations to show what happened in the three cases and how it could be prevented witheffective control and auditing. These three firms give a picture of how difficult it is to prevent and detectaccounting manipulations both from the firm’s side and the auditor’s side.The conclusion of the paper is that the internal control is a good tool to manage risk and create a corporategovernance. But it is necessary to make specific processes for the individual company to captureunsystematic actions that are the basis of accounting manipulations and it is very important to have a wellstructured management to prevent accounting manipulation. When it comes to auditing there must beobtained documentation and received plausible explanations for material items by the auditor. However, toensure that the documents are not forged, the auditor should receive external confirmation and receiveexternal documentation. In this way there is more assurance that the financial statements do not containmaterial misstatement.