http://afr.sciedupress.com Accounting and Finance Research Vol. 7, No. 2; 2018 Published by Sciedu Press 1 ISSN 1927-5986 E-ISSN 1927-5994 Impact of a Practical Flowcharts Approach on Educating the Control Risk Assessment Mohamed A. Wahdan 1 1 Assistant Professor of Accounting, Accounting Department, Faculty of Commerce, Menoufia University, Egypt. Correspondence: Mohamed A. Wahdan, Assistant Professor of Accounting, Accounting Department, Faculty of Commerce, Menoufia University, Egypt. Received: December 5, 2017 Accepted: January 1, 2018 Online Published: January 4, 2018 doi:10.5430/afr.v7n2p1 URL: https://doi.org/10.5430/afr.v7n2p1 Abstract The assessment of a control risk is a difficult task which has to be learned over the years. Experience is a good teacher in this respect. So, education guided by experience may be expected to be fruitful. The purpose of this paper is to develop practical flowcharts (PFs) to assist in educating the novices the assessment of control risk and to present the results of validation of PFs approach in classroom. The main research questions examined in the paper are: (1) how can the PFs be developed to help students and novice auditors assess the control risk? And (2) to what extent is using PFs effective as a tool to improve the education of assessing the control risk? To answer these questions, adequate field work and experiment were performed. The knowledge is acquired (a) from the literature and (b) from experienced auditors. The findings of the paper indicated that the conceptual model of PFs is successfully designed consisting of eleven submodels and ten PFs. Moreover, using a PFs approach is an effective tool to improve the education of assessing the control risk, i.e., the learning performance of students significantly improved via the PFs assignment. From the results of the validation, it may be concluded that the conceptual model of PFs provides a vital contribution to the auditing literature and the application of it constitutes a new education method of auditing. Keywords: Control Risk, Practical Flowcharts Approach, Auditors, Education 1. Introduction The auditor’s assessment of acceptable audit risk is a key element in the auditing process. Control risk is one component of the audit risk model. The composition of a control risk assessment is a difficult task which has to be learned over the years. Experience is a good teacher in this respect. So, education guided by experience may be expected to be fruitful. Furthermore, one approach to improve auditing education is to employ a practice set within the curriculum (Fanning and Grant, 2017). To assess the control risk, the auditors should obtain an appropriate audit evidence to be able to draw reasonable conclusions on which an assessment is based. Audit evidence has been obtained from tests of controls, substantive procedures or an appropriate mix of them (IFAC, 2010). According to Arens et al. (2014) and Wahdan (2006), there are two audit approaches: (1) the control approach: the auditors focus on the examination of the internal controls to reduce the amount of substantive tests they perform, and (2) the substantive approach: the auditors do not take into account the internal controls and focus their analysis directly on the amounts represented in the financial statements. Standard unqualified audit report loses some credibility when it is combined with an adverse report of entity-level internal controls over financial reporting as alleged by some users (Asare & Wright, 2012; Defond and Lennox, 2017). Furthermore, the firms with material weaknesses of internal control under SOX section 404 are more likely to receive going concern opinion (Jiang et al., 2010) and may be associated with both lower accruals quality and less accurate management guidance (Doyle et al., 2007; Feng et al., 2009; Lenard et al., 2016; Amoal, et al., 2017; Ji et al., 2017). Moreover, the quality of accounting information can only be guaranteed under effective internal control (Li et al., 2012; Feng, 2017). Management in most companies is required to design and maintain an effective internal control system and to make a report on the effectiveness of the internal control over financial reporting at the end of year. Moreover, auditors in a public company are required to evaluate and attest to the management’s report on the effectiveness of the internal control over financial reporting. Since 2004, larger public companies have been required by the SEC to annually obtain an auditor’s report on internal controls over financial reporting (Lopez et al., 2006;