Financial statement auditors provide some degree of assurance that financial statements are free of material misstatement. Many investors believe this degree of assurance should be higher in cases of intentional misstatement such as fraud than for unintentional misstatement, such as honest mistakes in management’s accounting. Many auditors would point out that fraud is much harder to detect than honest errors because management tries to conceal fraud, but not honest mistakes. According to auditing standards, what degree of assurance do financial-statement auditors provide that there are no material misstatements due to intentional misstatements (e. g., fraud) versus unintentional misstatements (e. g., honest computational mistakes)?

First of all, an auditor must be skeptical about the information that he/she is gathering and analyzing. They should try to get as much audit evidence as they can in order to form an opinion. But an auditor can also reasonably assure that there are no material misstatements, either intentional or not intentional.

Most auditor procedures are intended to discover unintentional misstatements, but intentional misstatements are very hard to discover because more than one individual (or even a very large group) might have colluded in order to conceal them. The auditor gets his information from the controller, internal auditor, and other people within the organization, but what if they all colluded in order to conceal their bad actions.

E.g. an auditor should check for shipping receipts to be complete, accurate and in order, but he/she relies on information given by the same people that he/she is evaluating. The auditor can conclude that the shipping reports are complete, but he/she cannot state that they are true and valid because he/she wasn't there.