An audit workpaper serves as a source document, which includes all of the evidence and opinions that were found in a particular auditing period. This important document embodies several benefits starting from the planning of the auditing process and continuing beyond when no engagement exists. If the company had been audited, a new auditing team can refer to these workpapers to assess the effectiveness of internal controls. In addition, managers can review these workpapers to evaluate the performance of the audit team. By evaluating the progress of the auditing team through these workpapers, audit managers can direct the auditing team towards must relevant tasks. This is extremely significant because the audit team has a time budget and a dead line to consider when performing an engagement. More importantly, the final workpapers generated allow the team to document all of its findings and safeguard its findings for future use. More often authorities rely on workpapers from the auditing team because it represents generally a source document of integrity vested upon the audit profession. Any third party can refer to workpapers for reporformance or other reasons as well. In respect to NextCard, Thomas Trauger went beyond auditing professional standard to instruct Flanagan to destroy a diskette containing original workpapers. These behaviors led officials to start investigating the case by using the original workpapers as source document. If it was not for these documented workpapers, it would had been extremely tedious to find Thomas- an auditor for Ernst & Young - guilty for destroying key documents after expressing an unqualified opinion.
Thus because of audit review work and reporformance requirement, an audit team must prepare a proper set of audit