Lakhasly

We understood how Shell is complying with those frameworks by making enquiries of management, internal audit, and those responsible for legal and compliance procedures. We corroborated our enquiries through our review of Board minutes, papers provided to the Audit Committee and correspondence received from regulatory bodies and noted that there was no contradictory evidence.
▪ We assessed the susceptibility of Shell’s Consolidated Financial Statements to material misstatement, including how fraud might occur, by embedding forensic specialists into our group engagement team. Our forensic specialists worked with the group engagement team to identify the fraud risks across various parts of the business. In addition, we utilised internal and external information to perform a fraud risk assessment for each of the countries of operation. We considered the risk of fraud through management override and, in response, we incorporated data analytics across manual journal entries into our audit approach. We also considered the possibility of fraudulent or corrupt payments made through third parties and conducted detailed analytical testing on third party vendors in high risk jurisdictions. Where instances of risk behaviour patterns were identified through our data analytics, we performed additional audit procedures to address each identified risk. These procedures included the testing of transactions back to source information and were designed to provide reasonable assurance that the financial statements were free from fraud or error. We also conducted specific audit procedures in relation to the risk of bribery and corruption across various countries of operation determined on a risk-based approach.
▪ Based on the results of our risk assessment we designed our audit procedures to identify non-compliance with such laws and regulations identified above. Our procedures involved journal entry testing, with a focus on journals meeting our defined risk criteria based on our understanding of the business; enquiries of legal counsel, group management, internal audit and all full and specific scope management; review of the volume and nature of complaints received by the whistleblowing hotline during the year; review of internal audit reports issued during the year; review of news releases published by external parties; and
▪ If any instances of non-compliance with laws and regulations were identified, these were communicated to the relevant local EY teams who performed sufficient and appropriate audit procedures, supplemented by audit procedures performed at the group level.