limited audit
- noun
- Specialized
- To ensure compliance, the accountant performed a limited audit of just the sales records for the past year.
Examples
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The company requested a limited audit to examine only the last quarter's financial transactions.
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After some discrepancies were found, the board mandated a limited audit focusing on the marketing expenses.
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Secrets abound at the Fed, and Congress recently demanded via passed legislation a 'limited audit' of the Fed to reveal merely some of what the Fed did with its money.
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How Extensive
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly and transparently derived from combining 'limited' (confined in scope) with 'audit' (an inspection); the adjective simply restricts the scope of the audit. This modifier+noun composition is a common, predictable pattern in English (and similar in many languages), so a B1 learner who knows both words will readily infer the intended meaning.
Etymology
Limited audit comes from the image of an auditor, a person who checks accounts, using a small flashlight to look into only one room instead of the whole company. Because the audit is limited to specific accounts or time periods, the phrase means an audit 'restricted' to certain areas or periods.