There may be several reasons why the cost of a meal in a hospital may have an issue with the account—starting from simple errors, including errors in amounts, price calculations, errors in the prices themselves, and ending with more severe shortcomings. These may include missed deliveries, lack of purchases, data entry errors, and inaccuracies in calculations. On an ongoing basis, such mistakes can lead to severe consequences both financially and in terms of the food itself, which is an unacceptable mistake in a hospital setting. Leaving patients or staff without food can lead to errors in the operational activities of employees and nurses or lead to a sharp deterioration in the condition of patients.
To assess the situation and return to the normal state of the accounts, it is necessary to choose an approach depending on the scale of the problem. If the errors are serious enough and there is a significant discrepancy, an audit is required. An audit should be carried out both among specific individual accounts and audit of the control system to understand what led to such errors and how to avoid them in the future. Audit of control systems is an important indicator when looking for errors in reports. If the organization’s internal controls are well-established and adequate, then the standards allow for the possibility of reducing the size of the audit sample and reducing the number of substantive procedures (Zheng & Bar, 2021). Therefore, depending on the audit of food price control systems, the sample size and the timing of the audit of the leading financial activity in this aspect will depend.
If the errors are minor and the deviations do not represent serious consequences, it is possible to find the error manually. Again, if the control systems work well, then it is possible to detect the moment of a discrepancy between the bill and food prices and find the reason for this discrepancy. In this case, audit operations are not required, and it will take much less time to solve this problem than if the analysis of documents and testing of control systems were carried out.
Reference
Zheng, Y., & Bar, T. (2021). Certifier competition and audit grades: An empirical examination using food safety certification. Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy. Web.