Assignment 2: LASA 1: Reporting Requirements

Dewey, Wright, and Moore have just been approached by a new client, AV Imports and Exports, a company that trades goods with various countries. You are in charge of an audit engagement.

AV Imports and Exports is a publicly traded company that does several billions of dollars of business every year. As partner at Dewey, Wright, and Moore, you understand the ramifications of the audit of a company of this size. Regulation is stringent, and the impact on the firm, as well as on the society, can be substantial if the audit fails.

As you have interns and first year staff assisting you with this audit, it is important that they are educated on the risk, the regulation that governs the audit, as well as both the client and firm conducting the audit. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) are the major regulators of concern. To educate your staff on regulation and importance of conducting the audit properly, you instruct them to do the following exercise.

Visit the PCAOB Web site (http://www.pcaobus.org/) and the U.S. SEC Web site (http://www.sec.gov/). Review the reporting requirements for publicly traded companies, including Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) requirements. Analyze the impact of the reporting requirements on the auditing profession.

In an 8-10 page paper, respond to the following:

• Explain how PCAOB and SEC have benefited the investor.
• Evaluate whether more regulation is required.
• Use the Argosy University online library resources to locate a case covering a CPA firm or public accounting firm involved in an audit failure. Explain whether or not you feel professional standards were appropriately applied in this case. Present the information in such a way that your staff can understand the significance of always maintaining the highest in professional standards.
• The overall risk assessment is now complete. As a part of planning the audit, you need to select an appropriate audit strategy for obtaining sufficient evidence for each significant financial statement assertion. The strategies are based on the interrelationships among evidence, materiality, and the components of audit risk.
  Define the term preliminary audit strategy.
• Summarize information about preliminary audit strategy from scholarly sources and cite the sources.
• Describe the components that should be specified in developing a preliminary audit strategy for your client and explain how the strategy relates to the audit risk model.

Give reasons for your assertions and format your paper in APA. You should have at least 6 outside sources in addition to your textbook and websites given above.

Training assessment is an important task for HR personnel. Use the Argosy University online library and textbooks to read about training assessments.

Then, consider the following scenario:

You have recently been appointed as a training manager for the southeast region of a major supermarket chain in the U.S. Your territory includes 15 retail stores. Your responsibility involves working directly with store managers and other stakeholders to develop training solutions to meet specific needs of employees in various stores. This includes, but is not limited to, performing needs assessments, determining appropriate instructional design and training delivery methods, as well as implementing and evaluating training initiatives.

Three of the stores in your territory have missed sales goals for the last two quarters. All three stores have received low customer satisfaction scores and are experiencing increased employee turnover rates. The high employee turnover has resulted in the store managers hiring many new and relatively inexperienced sales associates, which further contributes to the problem.

The senior management team of the supermarket chain believes that training and development may help decrease employee turnover and increase customer satisfaction. You have been asked to assess training needs and develop a proposal to address the situation in these three stores.

Instructions:

Use scholarly resources and your learning, address the following:

1. Identify, using simple heuristics, the indicators that show that the specific problems experienced by the three stores can be resolved through training.
2. Design a needs assessment plan and identify three specific training initiatives you would recommend for these employees. Include the expected outcomes for the three training initiatives in your proposal.
3. Select one of the specific training initiatives you identified and develop a budget of projected costs to implement this initiative.

Write a seven-to-nine-page training proposal in Word format. Apply APA standards to citation of sources.

Make sure you write in a clear, concise, and organized manner; demonstrate ethical scholarship in accurate representation and attribution of sources; and display accurate spelling, grammar, and punctuation.