Attest Function

  

Categories: Accounting

It sounds like one of the many parts of the Blade Runner mythos that causes your eyes to glaze over every time one of your friends brings it up. But in actuality, it’s part of the procedure for a financial audit.
Sometimes a company is required to submit its financial statements for an audit. In this process, an expert - usually a certified public accountant - reviews the company's books and makes a judgement about whether the financial statements meet certain standards.
This general process is known as the attest function. It's a somewhat fancy name for the main part of the audit procedure.

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Finance: What is Intestate/probate?6 Views

00:00

Finance a la shmoop what does it mean to die intestate and have your estate go

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into probate? alright people if you die with no will your said to have died

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intestate you're will-less sort of like a remote-controlled zombie spirit and this [Person holding remote and zombie appears]

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is bad if you had any dough left over at the end of your you know journey or at

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least bad for your would-be heirs why well because with no direction as to

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where to leave your financial leavings the state grabs it more or less thank

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you very much and if an heir does materialize well then your money has to

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go through probate which is like amature bait only it costs money so

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probate itself is the first step in dying financially or at least settling

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your state when you're you know doing backstroke Six Feet Under [Ghost man performing back stroke under the ground]

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specifically in probate proceedings the court acknowledges that your will

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whichever version your lawyers would present to the court is in fact your

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will and is representative of what you wanted your last dying wishes in giving

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away your money to be what can happen with poor estate planning well just ask

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actor James Gandolfini and well you can ask but he probably won't answer [Grave stone appears of James Gandolfini]

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Gandolfini that guy died in 2013 and when he did his family had to deal with

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two shocks the shock of his parting and the shock of how royally he had screwed

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up his estate and estate planning not giving five minutes thought to his heirs

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who you know he could have taken care of instead of everything going to

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Gandolfini's intended beneficiaries roughly thirty million dollars in taxes

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would end up going to the IRS and those guys didn't even attend the funeral [Man appears from an office desk]

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because Gandolfini hadn't been specific as to where the money went well there

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was four million in take out taxes for this probate proceeding and eight

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million for that and then he hadn't transferred a little bit of money each

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year to his heirs till all of it got taxed at a state tax rates which are

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very high and then it ended up not even actually going to the people he wanted

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like his kids and others who we loved and

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instead it went to a whole lot of government bureaucrats so yeah intestate

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is bad it puts your heirs in a difficult litigation situation forcing them to [Judge banging gavel]

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endure a ton of taxes in grief in addition to their uh you know grief

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