What journal-entry fraud testing actually looks for

Journal-entry testing has a reputation for being a box-tick. Done properly it is one of the few procedures that looks directly at the mechanism by which financial statements get manipulated: someone posts an entry.

The criteria auditors actually select on

• Round-dollar entries — manual adjustments rarely land on exact thousands by accident.
• Post-period entries made after the close.
• Unusual account pairings that do not fit the normal flow of the business.
• Entries by unexpected users — someone who does not normally post to that account.
• Weekend and holiday postings.

The workpaper is the deliverable

What matters afterwards is not that you ran a filter but that you can show which criteria you chose, why, what population you drew from, what you examined and what you concluded. That is what a reviewer or a successor auditor needs.

Our workpaper documents exactly that. It does not select the sample for you, does not compute a statistically valid sample size, and is not an audit opinion — materiality, confidence and tolerable misstatement are engagement-specific inputs, not constants we could honestly bake in.