Planning stage analytical procedures typically involve looking for unexpected changes in the
financial statements that might influence risk assessments. After the auditor identifies an unexpected
difference, the auditor attempts to find a potential explanation for the difference (Hirst and Koonce
1996). A target explanation was obtained by seeding an error causing a particular pattern of
discrepancy between what the analytical procedures would predict and the unaudited financial
information. For Task 3, the target explanation is an inventory cut-off problem (i.e., inventory
shipments being recorded in the wrong period), and for Task 4, the target explanation is unrecorded
sales revenue (i.e., sales that were made but not recorded in the accounting records).