Question

compare and contrast auditing and fraud examination. In addition to a definition be sure to include things like skills needed, education, certification requirements, career opportunities, and the code of conduct for each. Do you see these professions changing in the future, why or why not?

Answer 1

Auditing is the expression of opinion that whether financial statement are free from material misstatements arising from error or fraud.

Whereas fraud is the detection and establishment of fact of any wrongdoing done by officer, employee of the company or any third party.

Their major differences are listed as below :-

Criteria	Audit	fraud examination
Certification requirement	An auditor should have a certificate in his hand depending upon the country of incorporation of company. For eg. A person doing audit of financial statements of a company in incorporated in us should be a CPA.	there is no such requirement of countrywide certification requirement for a fraud examined. However fraud examiner in US may have a certificate of fraud examination.
Education	An auditor is expected to have a thorough knowledge of accounting standards, auditing standards like IFRS, USGAAP etc.	A fraud examiner is required to have a basic understanding of various subjects which came across in the field of his operation.
Frequency	frequency of audit is generally annual.	It cannot have ant frequency and is done on the basis of underlying situation and case
Career opportunities	An auditor can find employment in an auditing firm, or businesses in their accounting department or financial department.	Fraud examiner generally finds employment opportunities in fraud investigation organization.
Objective	objective of audit is to express opinion on whether financial statement as a whole are free from material mistatements and its financial statements are showing true and fair of view of state of it's affairs	objective of fraud examination is to establish a certain face or find out the amount of fraud involved or person involved in the fraud.
Reporting	Auditor generally reports to the stockholders through his audit report	fraud examiner generally reports to the institution engaging it to establish the fact through its report.

Yes there are lot of changes accepted in these profession in future.

For instance, traditionally audit was used to done on books of accounts which used to be maintained manually but nowadays transactions are recorded through IT systems and transaction instead of being processed through individuals at different stages is processed by systems and codes and there may be possibility of any wrong code being used due to which transaction may be processed in a wrong manner or it may be possible that system have been altered by any fraudsters in order to gain ang unjust advantage. Thus, auditor of future should be well versed with all these complications and should have a stronger hand in information technology unlike traditional auditors

Also in present scenarios we can see frauds being done in all together different manner. We have seen many instances of cyber attacks where perpetrator uses malicious codes and viruses or bugs to do fraudulent activities, which calls for investigator to be well versed with how frauds are being organized in the current world and how to overcome with all these intricacies.

All these things give Force to the fact that there professions will see change in the near future as well.