Study On The Quality Characteristics Of Environmental Auditing Evidence

Although the theoretical study of China’s environmental audit start from the late1990s, but in the two decades, has achieved fruitful results, published papers andworks more than1,500articles. However, the environmental audit evidence,whichruns through the whole environment of the audit process, the basis of the auditfindings, occupying a prominent place in environmental auditing theory, is rarely tobe concerned.This paper focuses on specific elements of environmental auditing rather than thestudy of whole of environmental auditing, and mainly uses normative researchmethod, intensively studies the quality characteristics of environmental auditingevidence. In the process of combing the literature on the characteristics of the existingenvironmental quality of audit evidence, I have found that there are some problems inthe existing research, such as “there are still inadequate theoretical basis”,“it has notyet formed a complete system”," it did not reflect the environmental auditingfeatures". For these shortcomings, this article is on the basis of the quality ofeconomic theory, seem evidences of the environmental audit as a special commodity,analyze the quality of economic of the environmental audit evidence from theperspective of creditors, then re-defined the connotation of the quality characteristicsof the environmental audit, which is the basic characteristics that can meet the highestquality of the auditor needs audit evidence should have.On this basis, build a system that can meet the optimal needs for quality ofenvironmental audit evidence of auditors. This article aside for the study perspectiveof quality and quantity of environmental audit evidence，hold that the auditor’sselection criteria is the lowest total cost of the auditor’s audit, which is the sum ofpurchase cost and the cost of use, however, the cost of use play a decisive role in thetwo elements. Purchase costs are the costs incurred by the auditor access to environmental audit evidence, the cost of use is the costs incurred in the course ofusing after the auditor get audit evidence.It include the use cost of time,human,financial, etc. which produced in the implementation of the environmental auditprocess, include auditors conduct,analyze and evaluate a forensic audit evidence,andthe cost of the formation. Also includes loss caused by published the inappropriateaudit opinion after the auditors complete the audit work and issued the audit reportbased on the environmental audit evidence.Based on this, this article constructs the environment audit evidence qualityfeature system that mainly base on core features, supplemented by constraintscharacteristic. The construction of the core features based on the strength of theevidence in perfect theory of evidence law, combined with the audit features thatauditor to perform environmental audit--the formation process of strength ofenvironmental auditing of the evidence from the potential probative force toSufficient proof strength. Auditors base on the requirements of a singleenvironmental audit evidence and constituted by the combination of differences,respectively, to discuss the quality characteristics of the single of the same identifiedenvironmental audit evidence of the quality characteristics and the overallenvironmental audit evidence, and separate the constraints characteristics from otherenvironmental audit evidence about the quality characteristics, and take which as theconstraints of environmental quality characteristics of the audit evidence. The corefeatures include that individual characteristics and the combination of characteristics.Among them, the individual characteristics formed the basis of the combination offeatures, the combination of environmental audit evidence to meet the combinedfeatures formed the basis of audit findings. Individual characteristics include thatreliability, relevance, and representativeness; combination of features include thatadequacy, diversity, double, correlation. Then combined with specific case, to verifythe practicality and feasibility of the Quality Control System this paper havebuilt.The constraint characteristics is that the auditors suffer economic constraintsin the pursuit of more probative force of evidence of environmental audit activitiesFinally, this paper takes the environmental audit performed on one iron and steelenterprises by the Audit in2006for example, excerpts from a specific project, namelywhether the emission of the iron and steel enterprises in industrial waste watercontaining the chemical oxygen demand (COD) meet the requirements. Analyze thequality characteristics of audit evidence that auditors have obtained. The results demonstrate the practicality and feasibility of the Quality Control System this paperhave built the environment audit evidence quality characteristics in the actualenvironment audit.