qualified and adverse opinion

Pls, explain the difference between the two.

Suspense, this is a somewhat technical area in auditing, and I’m sure you will find lots of examples if you search for these terms on the web. In brief:

A qualified opinion is issued when the auditor disagrees with the reporting/accounting treatment of an isolated issue. For example, it could be the level of inventory write-downs that the company took or the creation of a provision which the auditor deems to be unnecessary. If, other than that single issue, the auditor finds the rest of the financial statements to be compliant with reporting standards, the opinion issued will be a qualified one.

On the other hand, if the auditor has numerous reservations about the information presented in the financial statements, for example, he or she thinks the company overstated revenue, did not create required provisions, played around with depreciation estimates, etc. … all at the same time, and therefore determines that the statements as a whole do not give a reliable and faithfull account of what happened at the company over the reporting period, then the opinion issued will be an adverse one.

Another reason why these opinions are issued are limitations of scope but that tends to happen much less frequently than the reasons outlined above.

take care!

Many thanks sir.

Qualified - auditor cannot verify all of the information on financial statements. An example would be a managers assertion that a chunk of inventory is kept in another warehouse across the ocean. Mr. auditor will take their assertion and qualify the opinon that they cannot verify said inventory.

Adverse - many auditors walk away before this happens. There are irregularitys that do not comform to GAAP nor IFRS.

In the real world, this is the takeaway: you’ll almost never see an adverse opinion; the auditor will simply refuse to offer an opinion.

Wojtec covered it well, as usual, and CvM’s summary’s spot-on.

In a (slightly smaller) nutshell:

  • qualified means, “OK, except . . .”: generally OK, but one or two minor things that are a bit out of whack
  • adverse means , “Not OK”: too many things wrong for the statements to be of any practical use.

Thanks

Thanks

My pleasure.

Qualified opinion- Auditor always issue qualified opinion when they find the statement is making exception with accounting principles means not in order with( matching concept, revenue recognition principle, going concern concept etc).

Adverse opinion- It issued by an Auditor when they found misstatement with accounting standard, When the financial statement is having an entry that is not complying with Accountind standards with related( AS14, AS31).