Wise Lord & Ferguson, Chartered Accountants, Hobart, Tas

Audit Services

The Audit Services group at Wise Lord & Ferguson specialises in providing business and assurance solutions. These include External Audit, Internal Audit, Due Diligence Reviews, Probity Advice, Business Valuations and Systems Process Reviews.

Through all of our deliverables, we promote an underlying need to add value to your operations by identifying areas for improvement and recommending practical solutions.

How Audit Services can benefit your business or organisation
At Wise Lord & Ferguson we place the utmost importance in the delivery of quality, integrity and efficiency in our audit engagements. We deliver to you quality assurance services in an independent, objective and ethical manner.

Our affiliation with Ernst & Young allows our firm to access their comprehensive and up-to-date Global Audit Methodology to facilitate the delivery of the highest technical expertise in our audit engagements. By building strong working relationships with you, we aim to develop a deep understanding of your operations, allowing us to apply our methodology to meet your specific needs.

External Audit
External Audit refers to the processes of identifying and assessing the business risks of an organisation and the ways in which Management control those risks. This gives insight into direct financial risk. In addition to financial statement assurance, we add value to the client by suggesting ways in which your systems can be improved to strengthen internal controls.

Being a large Tasmanian owned firm with a large audit team, we are able to deliver assurance services in a wide variety of industries, and charge clients local rates. Also, the model that we employ of ‘Business Risk = Audit Risk’ ensures that we look outside of strictly the financial statements and increase our understanding of our clients’ businesses.

Internal Audit
We provide a comprehensive and effective method of identifying the key operational risks of an organisation. The methodology, developed by Ernst & Young, is designed to ensure alignment with corporate objectives. This is based upon the philosophy that by auditing the business itself, rather than the financial impacts of the business activity, we are able to provide greater value to you. It also means we provide a higher level of assurance in relation to the effectiveness of internal controls and management of risk.

Our internal audit approach is structured to provide two key services being targeted reviews and compliance reviews.

• Targeted reviews focus on key business processes or functions and allow the audit coverage to extend to broader areas of risk such as legislation compliance, policy frameworks, project management methodologies, and efficiency and effectiveness project reviews.
• Compliance Reviews focus on the internal controls surrounding the key transaction flows and are aimed at obtaining evidence that controls identified are in existence and operating effectively.

Our approach involves identifying key business risks, from a high-level perspective, allowing us to involve management in the process of identifying practical solutions to mitigate against financial loss.

Due Diligence Reviews
We can provide to the purchaser of a business, a financial and business risk analysis of the entity to be purchased. We deliver due diligence reviews of the highest integrity through our enhanced levels of experience, our ability to apply audit knowledge and our understanding of business processes and risks.

Probity Advice
We are able to provide an independent person to assess procurement processes to ensure they are completed in a fair and equitable way. Our high level of experience in this area as well as our proven methodology enable us to deliver probity services of the highest quality.