Sampling Accounting Populations: A Comparison of Monetary Unit Sampling and Sieve Sampling in Substantive Auditing

A population of debtors in an Irish company is audited and the results are analyzed to establish the error rates and error patterns. Audit populations are created based on the error patterns found in the sample audit. Simulation studies are carried out, using monetary unit sampling and sieve sampling, to examine the comparative performance of an estimator of total error amount in monetary unit sampling and sieve sampling. The empirical results indicate that sieve sampling is more efficient than simple random sampling for most sample sizes in all of the populations studied and is more efficient than systematic sampling for the larger sample sizes.