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Audit approach overview
Our audit approach will allow our client's accounting personnel to make the maximum contribution to the audit effort without compromising their ongoing responsibilities
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Annual and short period audit
At P&A Grant Thornton, we provide annual and short period financial statement audit services that go beyond the normal expectations of our clients. We believe strongly that our best work comes from combining outstanding technical expertise, knowledge and ability with exceptional client-focused service.
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Review engagement
A review involves limited investigation with a narrower scope than an audit, and is undertaken for the purpose of providing limited assurance that the management’s representations are in accordance with identified financial reporting standards. Our professionals recognize that in order to conduct a quality financial statement review, it is important to look beyond the accounting entries to the underlying activities and operations that give rise to them.
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Other Related Services
We make it a point to keep our clients abreast of the developments and updates relating to the growing complexities in the accounting world. We offer seminars and trainings on audit- and tax-related matters, such as updates on Accounting Standards, new pronouncements and Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) issuances, as well as other developments that affect our clients’ businesses.
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Tax advisory
With our knowledge of tax laws and audit procedures, we help safeguard the substantive and procedural rights of taxpayers and prevent unwarranted assessments.
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Tax compliance
We aim to minimize the impact of taxation, enabling you to maximize your potential savings and to expand your business.
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Corporate services
For clients that want to do business in the Philippines, we assist in determining the appropriate and tax-efficient operating business or investment vehicle and structure to address the objectives of the investor, as well as related incorporation issues.
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Tax education and advocacy
Our advocacy work focuses on clarifying the interpretation of laws and regulations, suggesting measures to increasingly ease tax compliance, and protecting taxpayer’s rights.
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Business risk services
Our business risk services cover a wide range of solutions that assist you in identifying, addressing and monitoring risks in your business. Such solutions include external quality assessments of your Internal Audit activities' conformance with standards as well as evaluating its readiness for such an external assessment.
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Business consulting services
Our business consulting services are aimed at addressing concerns in your operations, processes and systems. Using our extensive knowledge of various industries, we can take a close look at your business processes as we create solutions that can help you mitigate risks to meet your objectives, promote efficiency, and beef up controls.
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Transaction services
Transaction advisory includes all of our services specifically directed at assisting in investment, mergers and acquisitions, and financing transactions between and among businesses, lenders and governments. Such services include, among others, due diligence reviews, project feasibility studies, financial modelling, model audits and valuation.
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Forensic advisory
Our forensic advisory services include assessing your vulnerability to fraud and identifying fraud risk factors, and recommending practical solutions to eliminate the gaps. We also provide investigative services to detect and quantify fraud and corruption and to trace assets and data that may have been lost in a fraud event.
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Cyber advisory
Our focus is to help you identify and manage the cyber risks you might be facing within your organization. Our team can provide detailed, actionable insight that incorporates industry best practices and standards to strengthen your cybersecurity position and help you make informed decisions.
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ProActive Hotline
Providing support in preventing and detecting fraud by creating a safe and secure whistleblowing system to promote integrity and honesty in the organisation.
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Accounting services
At P&A Grant Thornton, we handle accounting services for several companies from a wide range of industries. Our approach is highly flexible. You may opt to outsource all your accounting functions, or pass on to us choice activities.
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Staff augmentation services
We offer Staff Augmentation services where our staff, under the direction and supervision of the company’s officers, perform accounting and accounting-related work.
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Payroll Processing
Payroll processing services are provided by P&A Grant Thornton Outsourcing Inc. More and more companies are beginning to realize the benefits of outsourcing their noncore activities, and the first to be outsourced is usually the payroll function. Payroll is easy to carve out from the rest of the business since it is usually independent of the other activities or functions within the Accounting Department.
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Our values
Grant Thornton prides itself on being a values-driven organisation and we have more than 38,500 people in over 130 countries who are passionately committed to these values.
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Global culture
Our people tell us that our global culture is one of the biggest attractions of a career with Grant Thornton.
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Learning & development
At Grant Thornton we believe learning and development opportunities allow you to perform at your best every day. And when you are at your best, we are the best at serving our clients
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Global talent mobility
One of the biggest attractions of a career with Grant Thornton is the opportunity to work on cross-border projects all over the world.
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Diversity
Diversity helps us meet the demands of a changing world. We value the fact that our people come from all walks of life and that this diversity of experience and perspective makes our organisation stronger as a result.
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In the community
Many Grant Thornton member firms provide a range of inspirational and generous services to the communities they serve.
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Fresh Graduates
Fresh Graduates
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Students
Whether you are starting your career as a graduate or school leaver, P&A Grant Thornton can give you a flying start. We are ambitious. Take the fact that we’re the world’s fastest-growing global accountancy organisation. For our people, that means access to a global organisation and the chance to collaborate with more than 40,000 colleagues around the world. And potentially work in different countries and experience other cultures.
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Experienced hires
P&A Grant Thornton offers something you can't find anywhere else. This is the opportunity to develop your ideas and thinking while having your efforts recognised from day one. We value the skills and knowledge you bring to Grant Thornton as an experienced professional and look forward to supporting you as you grow you career with our organisation.
Magnifying the internal audit process
27 Jan 2021Keeping a ship afloat means building and maintaining it using the right equipment so it could safely travel through dangerous water and reach its destination. An organization is similar to a ship. Companies range from small to big vessels, so to speak, traversing through diverse and challenging industries around the world.
To keep a strong company afloat, a topnotch deck, engine room and forecastle and other essential ship equipment — the internal controls — need to be established as the base of operations. These can help a company keep its affairs in order and have a better outcome in its operational journey. However, how does one determine if internal controls are robust? Are they enough to make a ship last for many years, or could they be the main reason for an inevitable shipwreck?
An internal audit assesses the level of an organization’s internal controls. It ensures that a company complies with existing laws and regulations in the ocean the company currently travels on and provides the necessary equipment to ensure a safe journey through tumultuous waters. Through this process, issues or lapses in prevailing internal controls are addressed and resolved.
It sounds simple, if one describes it this way. But in reality, companies struggle to monitor, resolve or even identify lapses in internal controls. This problem persists from the highest levels of an organization to the actual owners of these controls. Challenges encountered range from the initial awareness of the existence of these issues to their timely resolutions needed by the company. Even the audit group, which routinely assess these controls, experiences challenges in consolidating and manually updating the findings to be addressed by the management.
This brings us to the question: How can we upgrade the current internal audit process? If a company is like a ship floating idly in the middle of the ocean, it needs a reliable navigator to direct it in the right direction.
A company’s chosen audit issue management solution should help organizations automate
the process of tracking audit issues and monitoring the progress of their resolution in real time and without spreadsheets. Some other features to look for are being able to delegate tasks to the owners of process controls so that the open items can be easily viewed and followed up by the audit group for faster resolution. The upper management of a company should also have the option to monitor the status of audit issues.
Also, an audit management tool should not only be confined to monitoring audit issues through manual checking and updates. People in the organization should be notified of pending tasks through an available automatic email notification feature. Pending tasks should also be automatically raised to the appropriate organizational level for proper oversight.
As much as possible, the company’s audit management platform must also be web-based so that up-to-date evidence of resolution can be accessed anytime, anywhere. Seamless app connection should also be a feature, so that previous audit issues stored in spreadsheets can be integrated for efficient monitoring. This lessens the risk of using old monitoring files with issues that are not updated accordingly.
Last, a company’s audit management tool must provide its users the capability to customize audit issue criteria already identified. The use of this type of technology prevents an organization’s internal audit process from being unaware of current audit issues at hand. This enhances and sustains the flow of information from the bottom to the top level of a company, and vice versa.
Consistency in the internal audit will not only provide resolutions in the short term, but also affect the future operations of a company as it carries on with its everyday business routine. Robust internal controls are vital to the survival of an organization, so continuous assessment and improvement to get closer to the ideal organizational internal controls would not be regretted by the company.
Also, recommendations such as process improvements and advancements on how departments handle important documentation greatly enhances the prevailing “effective” internal controls.
Be the principal navigator of your organization. Do not be afraid to embrace a positive change from the very core. Aim to project the strength outward to affect overall operations and bring topnotch service to the industry as a whole.
The waves might be daunting, but if your ship is strong and you have a great navigator, you are ready to face them.
Gin Francisco is an associate consultant of the Advisory Services Division of P&A Grant Thornton. P&A Grant Thornton is one of the leading audit, tax, advisory, and outsourcing firms in the Philippines with 22 Partners and more than 900 staff members. We’d like to hear from you! Tweet us: @GrantThorntonPH, like us on Facebook: P&A Grant Thornton, and email your comments to gin.francisco@ph.gt.com or pagrantthornton@ph.gt.com. For more information, visit www.grantthornton.com.ph.
As published in The Manila Times, dated 27 January 2021