An internal auditor tested whether purchase orders were supported by appropriately approved purchase requisitions. She sampled a population of purchase documents and identified instances where purchase requisitions were missing. However, she did not notice that in some cases purchase requisitions were approved by an unauthorized person. Which of the following risks most appropriately describes this situation?
Nonsampling risk occurs when the auditor fails to recognize errors or exceptions in the sample that is being tested, not because the sample itself is unrepresentative, but because of human error or oversight. Sampling risk refers to the risk that the sample chosen is not representative of the entire population, leading to incorrect conclusions. This does not apply here, as the issue was the auditor's failure to detect a problem within the sampled items, not the representativeness of the sample itself.