Section V Persuasiveness of Evidence
The third standard of field work requires the auditor to accumulate sufficient appropriate evidence to support the opinion issued. Because of the nature of audit evidence and the cost considerations of doing an audit, it is unlikely that the auditor will be completely convinced that the opinion is correct. However, the auditor must be persuaded that the opinion is correct with a high level of assurance. By combining all evidence from the entire audit, the auditor is able to decide when he or she is persuaded to issue an audit report.
The two determinants of the persuasiveness of evidence are appropriateness and sufficiency, which are taken directly from the third standard of field work.
Appropriateness of evidence is a measure of the quality of evidence, meaning its relevance and reliability in meeting audit objectives for classes of transactions, account balances, and related disclosures. If evidence is considered highly appropriate, it is a great help in persuading the auditor that financial statements are fairly stated.
Note that appropriateness of evidence deals only with the audit procedures selected. Appropriateness cannot be improved by selecting a larger sample size or different population items. It can be improved only by selecting audit procedures that are more relevant or provide more reliable evidence.
Evidence must pertain to or be relevant to the audit objective that the auditor is testing before it can be appropriate. For example, assume that the auditor is concerned that a client is failing to bill customers for shipments （completeness transaction objective）. If the auditor selects a sample of duplicate sales invoices and traces each to related shipping documents, the evidence is not relevant for the completeness objective and therefore is not appropriate evidence for that objective.
A relevant procedure is to trace a sample of shipping documents to related duplicate sales invoices to determine whether each shipment was billed. The second audit procedure is relevant because the shipment of goods is the normal criterion used for determining whether a sale has occurred and should have been billed. By tracing from shipping documents to duplicate sales invoices, the auditor can determine whether shipments have been billed to customers. In the first procedure, when the auditor traces from duplicate sales invoices to shipping documents, it is impossible to find unbilled shipments.
Relevance can be considered only in terms of specific audit objectives, because evidence may be relevant for one audit objective but not for a different one. In the previous shipping example, when the auditor traced from the duplicate sales invoices to related shipping documents, the evidence was relevant for the occurrence transaction objective. Most evidence is relevant for more than one, but not all, audit objectives.
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