Footnote
A procedure may be said to be operationally effective if the procedure achieves its objective. The objective of accounting control procedures is to provide management with assurance that account balances (and related classes of transactions) do not contain misstatements. Thus, if an auditor performs tests of controls by gathering evidence that acontrol procedure relating to a particular account balance is operationally effective, an untrained person (i.e. a non-auditor) may incorrectly believe this means the account balance to which the control procedure relates does not contain any misstatements.

However, auditors know that it is only substantive procedures that provide evidence as to whether an account balance (or a class of transaction) contains a material misstatement and thus provide the ultimate evidence as to whether control procedures that relate to that account balance (or class of transaction) achieved their objective.

Auditors know that control testing procedures (or tests of control) only gather evidence that internal control procedures are operating as they were planned to operate. For example, typical control testing procedures gather evidence that management's internal control procedures were performed by the persons that were planned to perform the procedures, that they were performed at the planned time, in the manner planned and were supervised as planned. In other words, tests of control gather evidence of the ex-post design effectiveness of control procedures.

However, the term "effectiveness of operation" as it relates to tests of controls, is fairly well entrenched in the auditing vocabulary, and is therefore used in the ABREMA pages instead of the more correct term of "ex-post design effectiveness">.