The Financial Statement Assurance Continuum

When a company sells a receivable on The Receivables Exchange, the Seller agrees to repurchase the receivable if the Account Debtor (the Seller’s customer) does not pay it.

The Seller’s commitment to repurchase is the Buyer’s initial line of defense against loss.

The strength of that defense is a function of the Seller’s ability to fulfill its commitment.

If the Seller’s customer doesn’t pay, how likely is it that the Seller will be able to pay as required?

The bulk of the information available to help answer that question will come from the Sellers themselves, principally in the form of financial statements. (Even if a Buyer obtains supplementary credit information from an independent provider, much of the information will have been sourced from the company itself.)

Two threshold questions always have to be asked: a) does it appear from the information provided that the Seller has the capacity to fulfill its commitment, and b) what level of confidence should we have in the information provided?

Each Buyer will look at financial statements somewhat differently but any analysis is only as good as the information available to analyze. So we’ll focus here on the question of confidence.

There are four generally-recognized types of financial statements produced by corporate entities: 1) audited, 2) reviewed, 3) compiled, and 4) internally-generated.

In the first three cases, an independent accountant or accounting firm has had some degree of involvement in the preparation of the statements. Statements that are internally-generated have no third-party whose name and reputation is associated with the data provided.

There are important procedural, technical and legal distinctions that have to be made to accurately distinguish among the first three types of statements. For our purposes, however, I think we can use a convenient “shorthand” distinction that appeared in a paper published in March 2008 by the Reliability Task Force of the American Institute of CPAs.

That paper presents an “Assurance Continuum” that positions each of the three types of financial statements on a line that proceeds from the highest level of assurance that the information is reliable to the lowest level of assurance.

In the language of that Task Force Report:

An audited financial statement has a “High Assurance” of reliability.
A reviewed financial statement has a “Limited Assurance” of reliability.
A compiled financial statement has “No Assurance” of reliability.

It follows, I think, that an internally prepared statement, which has had no independent accountant’s review, would also fall in the “no assurance” category.

Now, the fact that an accountant has not certified the accuracy of the data presented in a financial statement doesn’t mean the data is NOT accurate. And we’re all aware of cases in which apparently diligent audits have proven inaccurate.

We also have to acknowledge that the staff of The Receivables Exchange does spend time and effort vetting potential Sellers.

All that said, however: it is still only reasonable to acknowledge that there is a higher level of reliability in the financial statements of a company whose books have been audited by a third-party professional than there is in the books of a firm that internally generates its own statements.

The level of risk in a Buyer’s analysis does, without question, vary with the reliability of the financial data.

All else equal, the lower the level of assurance that the Seller's financial data is reliable, the higher the appropriate Buyer’s risk premium.