KPMG's Audit Methodology transforms the traditional, compliance-driven audit process by creating a framework to assess how a company's business risks are managed. You benefit from this approach because it allows us to gain a thorough understanding of your business, including its strategies, business risks, and the processes that manage them-resulting in an effective and efficient audit for you. It focuses on critical success factors and key performance indicators that drive your organization, and positions us to add value through the audit.

KPMG's audit methodology comprises three distinct phases:

Strategic analysis - Using our industry experience and knowledge of best practices, our multidisciplinary engagement team gains a thorough understanding of your business. Working with you, we evaluate strategic business risks and regulatory challenges in order to assess their significance to your business and their potential effect on your financial statements. We then analyze both the key processes you have in place to manage these risks and the procedures used to record significant classes of transactions.

Process analysis - We document and make sure we understand your key business processes by evaluating the underlying risks involved. We then test the design and operating effectiveness of your risk-management controls, if needed use that as a basis for our Section 404 attestation. We decide on audit objectives associated with these risks and assess the possibility of misstatement in your financial statements for each audit objective. We test controls throughout the period under audit to help eliminate last-minute surprises and help reduce the amount of period-end auditing required.

Substantive procedures, evaluation and reporting our findings - In this phase we perform detailed, substantive audit procedures as planned; identify and investigate audit differences; evaluate findings; form our audit opinions; and report our findings.

Tailoring Our Audit to Fit You

Our audit approach will be tailored specifically to your business and the regulatory and market environments in which it operates. To do that, we will create a business model that represents the foundation for an audit by assessing your control environment and its conformity to Committee of Sponsoring Organizations (COSO) criteria. Our business model will help ensure that we fully understand your business processes, your goals, and your strategies. This model will be a blueprint for identifying and assessing risks that may threaten achievement of your objectives. From this information, the engagement team can remain focused on risks that impact your business-and the financial statement audit.