Footnote

Note that ISAs only recognize financial statement assertions and do not specifically recognize internal control assertions.

ISA500 "Audit Evidence" states that management implicitly or explicitly makes certain assertions regarding the financial statements and that the assertions used by auditors fall into one of the following 13 categories:

• classes of transaction: occurrence, completeness, accuracy, cut-off, and classification,
• account balances: existence, rights and obligations, completeness, and valuation and allocation,
• presentation and disclosure: occurrence and rights and obligations, completeness, classification and understandability, and accuracy and valuation.

In ABREMA, it is argued that there are only three ways in which the financial statements may be misstated. A misstatement of completeness occurs when an item which should be included is not included; a misstatement of validity occurs when the information includes an item that should not be included; a misstatement of accuracy occurs when the information includes an item that should be included, but it is not included accurately. Accordingly, there are just three financial statement assertions of concern to auditors, with slightly different definitions at each of the three levels of aggregation. However, the definitions of these three assertions for each of the three levels of aggregation embrace the meanings underlying the 13 ISA categories of assertions.