Auditors are required to plan and perform an audit to obtain reasonable assurance that the client’s financial statements are free of material misstatement.
These misstatements include overstatements and understatements of both revenues and expenses, and auditors should be concerned with each of these items.
However, since company executives are much more likely to overstate revenues and understate expenses, auditors are more focused on the possibility of revenues being overstated.
Auditors are taught to be conservative and are naturally biased in that direction. Useful strategies for uncovering understatements of revenue