Financial Systems and Auditing Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Financial Systems and Auditing - Essay Example The auditor's responsibility is to form and express an opinion on the company's financial statements, while the entity's management is responsible for the preparation and presentation of financial statements. Audit in general may include the entire examination of the unit's organization, the system as well as the function including the evaluation if the audit complied with significant laws, its rules and regulations. The audit must also be in compliance to the applicable policies of University, there should be internal controls' adequacy and the operations' efficiency and its effectiveness. The focus of the audit is to determine the adequacy of procedures and the company's internal control. The adequacy in procedures is indeed a great help for the purpose of ensuring the system's objectives, the function of the company and to achieve the unit's effectiveness and efficiency. The adequacy of control is also preventing the outcome of occurrence and therefore unwanted. The available financial records in an audit are audit statements, bond issues, budget, the annual comprehensive financial reports and other financial reports. The audit statements should be selective in terms of the statement's type, not just only with the objects of specific schema where the company operates but the options must be broad in terms of the use of auditing and the consideration with the options of related actions. The audit statement must be for users' selection for the purpose of tracking several statements. Bond issues maybe through underwriting which is usually the common process. The underwriting of bonds includes one or more securities of firms and banks forming the syndicate buying the bonds' entire issue coming from the issuer then reselling to the investors. The bonds of government are said to be auctioned.Another record of the company that needs to be audited is the budget. Budget is the detailed plan, expressed in quantitative terms that specify how resources will be acquired and used during a specified period of time. Budget should be audited in order to find the most profitable direction which the operations can take and in order for the company to develop in detail the balanced and coordinated program in direction and to assist in controlling the operations in the execution of the said programs. Budget must have the complete support of top management and it must be realistic and the goals must also be attainable. The Financial Report is the statutory basis that must be prepared for audit purposes wherein this can be meeting the requirements of state finance law in order to present fairly the results for computing and certifying the Stabilization Fund' balance and the fund for Tax Reduction to report and disclose the aspects pertaining to the financial performance. The importance of other financial r

Reasons For Using Jungle Computing Systems Information Technology Essay

Reasons For Using Jungle Computing Systems Information Technology Essay The application of high-performance and distributed computing in scientific practice has become more importance, among the most available platforms such as clusters, grids and cloud systems. These infrastructures are now undergoing many changed due to the integration of core technologies, providing speed improvements for selected compute kernels. As the distributed and high-performance computing is becoming more heterogeneous and hierarchical, complexity in programming is increased. Further, these complexities arise due to urgent desire for scalability and issues like data distribution, heterogeneity in software and hardware availability. These issues force scientists into simultaneous use of multiple platforms (e.g. clusters, grids and clouds used concurrently). 6.1 Jungle Computing Jungle Computing is a distributed computing paradigm. It simply emerged out of the plethora of distributed resources available. A Jungle Computing System consists of all compute resources available to end-users, which includes clusters, clouds, grids, desktop grids, supercomputers, as well as stand-alone machines and even mobile devices. There are several reasons for using Jungle Computing Systems. Firstly, an application may require more compute power than available in any one system a user has access to. Secondly, different parts of an application may have different computational requirements, with no single system that meets all requirements. From a high-level view, all resources in a Jungle Computing System are in some way equal, all consisting of some amount of processing power, memory and possibly storage. End-users perceive these resources as just that: a compute resource to run their application on. Whether this resource is located in a remote cloud or located down the hall in a cluster, is of no interest to an end-user, as long as his or her application runs effectively. Despite this similarity of resources, a Jungle Computing System is highly heterogeneous. Resources differ in basic properties such as processor architecture, amount of memory and performance. As there is no central administration of these unrelated systems, installed software such as compilers and libraries will also differ. For example, where a stand-alone machine is usually permanently available, a grid resource will have to be reserved, while a cloud requires a credit card to gain access. Also, the middleware used to access a resource differs greatly because of using different interfaces. The heterogeneity of Jungle Computing Systems makes it hard to run applications on multiple resources. For each used resource, the application may have to be re-compiled or even partially re-written, to handle the changes in software and hardware available. Moreover, for each resource, a different middleware interface may be available, requiring different middleware client software. Once an application has been successfully started in a Jungle, another aspect that hinders usage of Jungle Computing Systems is the lack of connectivity between resources. 6.2 Jungle Computing Systems When grid computing was introduced over a decade ago, its foremost visionary aim was to provide efficient and transparent (i.e. easy-to-use) wall-socket computing over a distributed set of resources. Since then, many other distributed computing paradigms have been introduced, including peer-to-peer computing, volunteer computing and more recently cloud computing. These paradigms all share many of the goals of grid computing, eventually aiming to provide end-users with access to distributed resources (ultimately even at a world-wide scale) with as little effort as possible. These new distributed computing paradigms have led to a diverse collection of resources available to research scientists, which include stand-alone machines, cluster systems, grids, clouds, desktop grids, etc. With clusters, grids and clouds thus being equipped with multi-core processors and many-core add-ons, systems available to scientists are becoming increasingly hard to program and use. Despite the fact that the programming and efficient use of many-cores is known to be hard, this is not the only problem. With the increasing heterogeneity of the underlying hardware, the efficient mapping of computational problems onto the bare metal has become vastly more complex. Now more than ever, programmers must be aware of the potential for parallelism at all levels of granularity. But the problem is even more severe. Given the ever increasing desire for speed and scalability in many scientific research domains, the use of a single high-performance computing platform is often not sufficient. The need to access multiple platforms concurrently from within a single application often is due to the impossibility of reserving a sufficient number of compute nodes at once in a single multi-user system. Moreover, additional issues such as the distributed nature of end-users, simultaneously comprising any number of clusters, grids, clouds and other compute platforms. Summary For every new technology several research frontiers are to be exploited. So in Cloud computing. Topics of such a kind are effective data protection in Internet clouds, innovative applications on the clouds, data centers and the Internet of things (IoT). The material in the Chapter 1 deals with future trends of cloud computing, next-generation services related to cloud computing are explained. With the emergence of the mobile cloud, more and more productivity applications residing on mobile devices are developed. Chapter 2 details how mobile and cloud computing can be combined and also exploits its key requirements. It is time to design and build computing systems capable of running adjusting to different circumstances and using their resources to handle most efficiently the workloads we put upon them. These autonomic systems combined with cloud computing is called as Autonomic Cloud computing is discussed in Chapter 3. With Web 2.03.0, Internet multimedia is emerging as services. To provide rich services in media, multimedia computing became a promising technology to generate, edit, process, search media contents which includes audio, image, video and graphics. Chapter 4 presents principal concepts of multimedia cloud computing. Energy efficiency is an important aspect IT field. Energy consumption, resource utilization and performances of workloads in Cloud are dealt in Chapter 5. We need a platform which will need speed and scalability in everyday scientific practice and the resources employed by end-users are often more diverse than those contained in a single cluster, grid, or cloud system. Jungle Computing is explained in Chapter 6.

Y2k Vs. Stock Market Crash :: essays research papers

The stock market crash of 1929 and the year 2000 bug are very similar. Black Thursday was not one of the brightest days in American History. This day was the cause of a nation downward spiral that closed 4000 banks, starting the great depression, and leading to stock that at one time would decrease 89% to the value some had bought. The cause of the stock market crash was largely due to over investment. The problem was people who didn't have the resources, investing from credit to buy into the short-lived age of wealth. Many people now are investing data in computers that is irreplaceable. They leave the data there assuming it will be there the next day or whenever they need it. In an age of information this might not be a wise idea. People are buying information on margin. They buy easy interfaces like Turbo Tax and Windows 98 that come to a computer user with almost no skill. The data is invested by these 'Computer Dummies';. It is the assumption that the data will be safe that will hurt computer users worldwide. It will happen sooner or later which is what people in 1929 knew about the stock-market crash. Many believe the most logical date for this data crash is January 1st, 2000. Many know about it and the possible 'infections'; the Year 2000 bug could cause to our every day life. Little is being done to solve this problem, considering it's monstrosity. One might believe that in the year 2000 havoc will be spread and a depression will occur because of this glitch. Another theory is that we will eventually run out of places to store data. Another date for an eventual breakdown would be February 29th, 2000 because most century years are not leap years. Many people have created ways to save the stock market and banks from another financial breakdown, however computer programmers have not invented a way to stop a massive data breakdown. The biggest problem is that the breakdown won't occur over a few days, like the Black Thursday through Black Tuesday did, it will occur over seconds. On Black Thursday 12,894,650 shares of stock were sold. On Monday Oct. 28th , 1929 9,250,000 shares were sold. On Black Tuesday 16,410,030 shares were sold. These three days added up to over $26 billion dollars of damage to the economy, and by the end of the month $100 billion dollars.

Linclon Reaction Paper Essay

On Monday November 26th I watched the recently released film Lincoln, at United Artists Cinema in Long Beach. Lincoln was directed by Steven Spielberg and released in cinemas around the United States on November 16th, 2012. The film had a well-known cast with Lincoln’s character was played by Daniel Day-Lewis, Mary Todd Lincoln by Sally Field, William Seward by David Strathaim and Thaddeus Stevens by Tommy Lee Jones. The film was based on Doris Kearns Goodwin biography titled ‘Team of Rival: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln’. After the release of the book Spielberg became fascinated with Lincoln’s character and gained the film rights to the book. Shortly after pre-production for the film began back in 1999. The story line is based around the last four months of President Abraham Lincoln’s life during his second term of his presidency. The Civil War is believed to be coming to an end and the northern states of the union continue to fight the southern confederate states in an effort to abolish slavery. The film heavily focuses on the month of January in 1865 where Lincoln directed his efforts on passing the thirteenth amendment to the United States Constitution through the House of Representatives. Previous to the amendment in 1963, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation which proclaimed all slaves in the United States to be ‘forever free,’ including those men from the confederate states that were in rebellion during the war. Most people thought that the war was coming to an end within the coming months and Lincoln believed the Emancipation Proclamation would be disregarded once the war ended and peace was established. Passing the thirteenth amendment was preciou s to President Lincoln as it formally and legally outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude of all peoples of the United States. Lincoln so far has been very well received and there are many elements that make the film both notable and exemplary. Many critics are already prophesizing Daniel Day-Lewis to be a top contender for the Academy Award for Best Actor and the film to be voted Best Picture of the year. Daniel Day-Lewis does a fantastic job at bringing Lincoln’s character to life and gives him a very likeable demur for the audience. His ability to become the character, captures the great man that President Lincoln was. Due to the narrow focus of the story line the audience is able to grasp Lincoln in a way that is unprecedented by other story tellers. Sally Field is also very convincing in her role as Mary Todd Lincoln with an emotional nature as she mourns the loss of her young son Willie. The film is very consistent with the events of the time and paints an accurate and believable picture for the audience of life during the civil war for both soldiers and diplomats. They highlight how President Lincoln was a wind of change during the difficult and turbulent time during the Civil War. The film explains the importance and actual proceedings that were involved with passing of the thirteenth amendment to all viewers in a way that is enjoyable to both history buffs and younger audience members with a less detailed knowledge of the time. Although the film has been well received flaws can be observed by viewers. The story line only covers a very short space of time of the last four months of Lincoln’s life. It would have been interesting for the audience to have learnt more about Lincoln’s two terms as president. The films focuses exclusively on the passing of the thirteenth amendment and leaves out other significant achievements of Lincoln and important on goings during that period. This narrow subject area focus made the film quite slow for the audience. Sections of the film seemed to drag on and may have been cut out to include a larger time scale of events. The film highlighted what a great leader Lincoln was. It showed how he was strong in times of adversity and continued to flight for the rights of all America men. He held his moral ground on the issue of slavery and ensured that he achieved equality for African Americans. Lincoln role was important as he established America as the land of freedom for all. At the end of the film Lincoln is assassinated. It is a sad moment in the film yet highlights the notoriety that comes with holding such a prominent position of office and that sensitive political topics sometimes cause irrational behavior among citizens. In the wake of the recent presidential election the lessons of Lincoln seem particularly relevant. The election of President Barak Obama as the first African American president was a landmark in American politics and society. It was also a victory for the legacy of President Lincoln who emancipated colored slaves and set them free on American soil. Obamas election as president highlights the good work that Lincoln fought for and achieved with his Emancipation Proclamation and the passing of the thirteenth amendment. Lincoln the film is an outstanding example of how democracy can be used to achieve great things. The film highlighted that the political process can be very difficult especially when trying gain approval from both political parties on sensitive issues. The scene that follows the morning of the vote on the thirteenth amendment is very emotional as the senators each take time to cast their individual vote. This highlights the importance of the individual in maintaining a democracy that is fair and representative of the people’s voices. The strong spirit and moral code that Lincoln bought to his role as president are characteristics that should be emulated by current and future presidents and members of congress in the United States. Lincoln stood behind his demand for peace with the southern states. US political leaders should strive to achieve peace with nations yet ensure that human rights abuses are not being violated by the enemy. The US should stand on the moral high ground to protect the freedoms of the citizens in their jurisdiction. Lincoln believed that the abolishment of slavery needed to be rooted in the law and stood behind this decision to ensure that he achieved the right outcome for the American people. US politicians must ensure that they make choices which benefit all US citizens and are of a high ethical standard. The legalization of gay marriage may be the modern equivalent to the outlaw of slavery though the thirteenth amendment in 1865. Earlier this year President Obama officially stated that he endorsed the legalization on gay marriage and that he believes homosexual couples should be able to marry in the United States. This is similar to Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation which gave indication that Lincoln personally felt slavery was cruel and inhumane. Lincoln’s courageous efforts for liberty are still being replicated within the political system. During the recent election Maryland and Maine both passed laws to legalize gay marriage and create equality. The passing of these state laws highlights a step by President Obama, US Senators and the American people to continue Lincoln’s legacy of creating freedom of choice for all in the United States.

Bak Funeral Home Case Study Analysis

The funeral industry has changed very much. It has less similarity as in traditional way of funeral in 1975. There have been incredible alterations over the past few decades due to Federal Trade Commission (FTC). FTC has mandated alterations in the funeral service pricing, alterations in consumer preferences, and consolidation of funeral service providers. In 1984, FTC wanted funeral homes to offer customers with a general price list that disintegrates the prices of each component of the funeral.For instance, instead of charging one price of $9000 for all merchandise and services for funeral purposes, the funeral home must divide the charges into components, for example, $3450 for casket, $540 for embalming, $185 for cosmetology, hairdressing and placement in casket, etc. In addition, the FTC has declared that funeral homes may not require customers to buy a lot of items, in particular caskets or burial vaults from the funeral homes.Customers may buy either or both the components fro m a dealer apart from the funeral director and have the casket transported to the funeral home and the vault transported to the cemetery. Nowadays, there are several non funeral home dealers of these components. Customers can go online to buy caskets and vaults from the Funeral Depot or the American Casket Store with next-day delivery assured. A number of religious orders manufacture caskets that they market through â€Å"funeral resource centers† positioned in big cities. Moreover, the preferences of the customers have altered dramatically.About 30 years ago, nearly 93 percent of the families prefer to go for traditional funeral followed by earth burial. Today, the percentage of burials has declined by 71 percent, whilst the percentage of cremation has increased to 29 percent on national level (Ruhl and Wilson, 2008. p. 482, 484). The funeral industry has advanced from a comparatively plain local business that was in large portion unfettered into a contemporary industry cont rolled by multi mortuary business corporations struggling for economies of scale.2 a) Sabina need to calculate the depreciation of the rental property in order to buy the Bak Funeral Home. There is a need to check all tax issues methodically with a tax accounting professional, however the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in general allows devaluing the value of the construction on the property over a period of 27 and half years. This is the rational treatment of the fact that structures do wear out eventually, or become out of date owing to their older qualities no longer in demand. So, Bak Funeral Home has been generating some positive cash flow per year.However, now some of that income can be offset for taxes. The building is depreciated by cutting out the value of the land and dividing the building value by 25 years for annual depreciation (25 years because the building was constructed in 1980 and the valuation is being done in 2005). The depreciation calculation looks like this: 1 . Purchase price – Land Value = Building Value. 2. Building Value / 25 = Annual allowable depreciation deduction (Kimmons, n. d. ). The Bak Funeral Home has a depreciation value.Thus, it would not be feasible for Sabina to buy back the Funeral Home and ask her mother, Joan to rent her the existing building for $2000 per month. Individuals invest in property not only for the income prospective it presents, but also for the tax benefits that accompany owning and renting out assets. Possessing property and renting it out is a business. One can take in revenue (rent) and incur costs similar to any other business. The greater part of operating expense deductions comes from money that one has expended on the property.There are deductions permitted for mortgage interest and property taxes, in addition to deductions for insurance, maintenance, and mending on the buildings. One expense that requires no expenditure of money is reduction on the property. This is an accounting deduction that is permitted and is based on the general wear and tear on the building. If Sabina can show a loss on her rental property, where her expenditures exceed her income, she might be able to remove the loss on her tax return. The only way that she can deduct the loss is to be an active member in the supervision of the property.She can hire a property manager to carry out the day-to-day tasks, but she needs to be aggressively participating in appreciating terms of contracts, interviewing probable tenants, and approving expenses that go toward upholding the building (Tax Tips: All about Rental Property Tax Breaks, n. d. ). Hence, Joan (her mother) would agree to this arrangement. 2 b) Joan requires 11 percent cash flow return on her investment in the building. The market value of the building is $1800, 000. Sabina would not need to pay state and federal income taxes because the company would be operating at a loss.As the net income is declining year after year, that is why; Sabina shou ld not purchase Bak Funeral Home and operate it at its present location. 2 c) Now we need to check whether it is feasible for Sabina to purchase Bak Funeral Home business and operate it in nearby location. Sabina would be finding an investor who would be willing to purchase and build a new funeral home away from Regional Airport where land values are lower. At least ten residential lots will be required for car parking. Each lot is sold at $30,000.Building costs would be $900,000 and real estate cost $25000. Here also, the assumptions are made. Sabina would not need to pay state and federal income taxes because the company would be operating at a loss. It would be feasible for Sabina to buy back the Bak Funeral Home and operate it in nearby location as the values of the land seem to be lower. 2 d) Firms whose level of performance is below parity, or that finds it more and more difficult to flourish in the new economic world order, seeks and implements techniques to enhance performan ce and augment shareholder wealth.For those managers who are critically considering whether a merger or a consolidation would be feasible option for their firms, understanding the rules and methods governing these events will facilitate them to make their choice. Thus, given the current situation Sabina should approach Modelski Funeral Home and suggest that she merge the Bak Funeral Home Business into Modelski location. If the two businesses are combined, then both the business would be able to prosper and as the stake is 50-50, then it would not be any problem for the companies if they even incur losses.They will be able to compensate and they would also had a larger portion of market share in the industry. 2 e) In this case, Sabina should buy the Bak Funeral Home Business at the price which her mother, Joan is offering and would definitely merge with Modelski business. As she would be able to purchase the business at an interest free rate over a period of five years, thus it would be viable for her to buy the business. 2 f) Reputation indeed does work in case of Sabina as she has been managing her father’s business for few years. She herself is a brand as people are aware of her name and fame being a funeral director.However, if she goes by profit making motive, then it would not work in the long run. She should buy her Bak Funeral Home at the interest free rate which her mother is offering. 2 g) The price is based on the firm’s ability to generate a stream of profit or cash flow. The seller projects this stream of cash more than 5 or more years to compute the worth of the business. Often, discounted future earnings are applied which takes into consideration the time value of money – cash obtained in year 5 is discounted based on probable interest rates.In this process disagreements can crop up regarding estimation of cash flow and predictable sales projections. A lot of cash flow and EBITA (earnings before interest, taxes and amortizati on) protuberances employ â€Å"recast† numbers to reproduce the outcome on profits of perquisites that a business proprietor takes from the business (How to sell a small business, n. d. ). Thus, it would not be feasible for Sabina to get out of the funeral business and let her mother to sell the business at a price which is five times the cash flow of the company.3) In spite of of the prevention methods employed, probable threats that could arise inside or outside the organization which needs to be evaluated. Even though the exact nature of probable disasters or their resultant effects are hard to determine, it is advantageous to perform a complete risk assessment of all threats that can sensibly occur to the organization. Despite the type of threat, the objectives of business recovery planning are to guarantee the safety of consumers, staff and other personnel during and following a catastrophe (Wold and Shriver, n. d. ).