Considerations In Designing And Implementing Petroleum Reserve Auditing Methods
Authors: Nemeth L.K. , Butler John R. , Lamme C.L. 
Published: December 2007

The issuance in late 1978 of ASR No. 253 by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires that reserve information be disclosed as an auditedpart of a company's financial statement for fiscal years ending after December 25, 1980. The SEC requires that the present value of estimated future netrevenues from proved reserves of oil and gas discounted at 10% be presented in the footnotes to the financial statements (and consequently covered by the financial auditor's opinion). Similar disclosure rules require that reserve data be presented as unaudited information for fiscal years ending before December 26, 1980. While reserves for fiscal years ending before December 26,1980, will not be covered by the auditor's opinion, these years will be the base years from which changes in reserves are calculated and therefore may have to be included in the auditor's opinion in 1980. The December 26, 1980, date represents a postponement by the SEC of one (1) year of its disclosure deadlineas initially proposed by ASR No. 253 as amended in 1979 by Release Nos.33-6079; 34-15921; and 35-21101.

In addition, the SEC has also proposed Reserve Recognition Accounting (RRA).RRA would replace the traditional methods of accounting, Successful Efforts or Full Cost, and would require that changes in oil and gas reserves, i.e. discoveries and revisions, become an integral part of a company's incomestatement. The SEC has proposed that a supplemental earnings summary using RRA be presented along with the traditional financial statements for presented along with the traditional financial statements for fiscal years ending after December 25, 1979. This supplemental disclosure would be unaudited for 1979 and audited thereafter and would continue for approximately three years to allow sufficient time to determine the feasibility and procedures of using RRA as the primary accounting method in a company's audited financial statements.

With the SEC's pronouncement, the reservoir engineering consultant will be thrust into a new type of work, "reserve auditing". For instance, the public accounting profession has published an audit guide which calls for the participation of an published an audit guide which calls for the participation of an independent petroleum engineer in performing an audit of reserve information in most cases. It is felt that the procedures used by the engineerin reserve auditing should be similar to those used by the public accounting profession in conducting their financial audits. Such an approach requires development of methodology new to the petroleum industry.

The reserve audit approach presented in this paper is designed to roughly parallel the major functions of a financial audit which centers around the following tasks:General risk assessment,Evaluation of internal systems and controls,Compliance testing,Substantive testing,Final evaluation, andReserve report and recommended improvements.

Certain variations have been introduced to this general audit pattern to account for the unique characteristics of reserve pattern to account for the unique characteristics of reserve information.

The proposed approach should be the most cost effective way to conduct reserve auditing, and result in minimum disturbance to the company during the audit period. This paper outlines the approach with emphasis on planning for and implementing a reserve audit.