make your audits more relevant and provide value-added insights and services to your clients.
by alan anderson, cpa
transforming audit for the future
the question professionals should always ask is, “are we leaving the profession better than we found it?” so, let’s ask: are we leaving the audit profession in better shape than it was when we inherited it?
more: put the ethics code to work for your clients and your firm | turning audit & accounting into assurance & advisory | wanted: great audit mentors | is audit in crisis because of definitions? | stop sending the wrong message to audit teams | closing the audit expectations gap
exclusively for pro members. log in here or 2022世界杯足球排名 today.
right now, we’re not providing value, but i honestly believe it’s not too late. the future of audit is ours to create or a future that will happen to us, and not necessarily a future we would prefer.
it will take leadership to change the future of audits. we have to take ownership of the process.
i’m an optimist. i think auditing can be fun. it can be at least challenging and rewarding, but you have to have a passion and an intellectual curiosity to really understand your business. if you have that passion and intellectual curiosity, then when you come up as partners, you’re going to say that group of staff, they get it because we brought them along.
but, before starting the framework, we need to build a foundation. this foundation is the four basic understandings that every auditor needs to master.
about six years ago, i worked onsite with a firm, and the managing partner entered the room. i asked him, “what’s your goal for this operational project i’m doing for you?” he said, “al, i just want the silver bullet.”
i basically closed my laptop and said “i’m out of here. there’s no such thing as a silver bullet. instead of a silver bullet, think in terms of foundational understandings. you’ve got to understand your client. you have got to understand your industry and what you’re dealing with. you need to understand the standards, and you really need to understand how to do the audit.”
so, the four understandings, again, are:
- understand your client
- understand your client’s industry
- understand the standards
- understand the audit
let’s break this down.
understanding your client
now, every standard audit program has a section on understanding the client. and if this is a client you worked with last year, those answers get rolled forward, and usually a staff auditor will get the job of updating that form. so, the staff auditor will sit with the accounting manager and will go over that form and the answers from last year, and then the understanding of the client stops there.
at best, that form gives you a superficial understanding of the client. you know what industry they’re in. you know what software they use for their accounting. you know the names and job titles of those who do the accounting.
but what’s left off that form is, what are they trying to do? where does that client want to be in five or 10 years? do the people doing the accounting tasks know what they’re doing? do they have streamlined processes or are they using lots of workarounds?
what about how their software interacts with their other business modules and the other software they use to run their business? are they using automation or doing lots of manual data entry for reconciliations and calculations? where are the bottlenecks? where are the places where something might go wrong?
you can’t really have a quality audit, and your audits won’t be relevant, if you don’t understand the client in these areas.
understanding the client is crucial to planning the audit. when you gain a deep understanding of the client, you can ensure that you’re not doing too few procedures and you’re not doing procedures that don’t add anything of value to the audit.
understanding the industry
i’ve seen way too many firms insist they can audit any balance sheet. that may be true, but you risk missing something big that would only be clear if you know the industry well. and if you don’t know the nuances of an industry, it’s nearly impossible to provide relevant insights to your client, ideas that will help that client make progress toward business goals.
when you understand the industry, you know what the accounting issues will likely be. you know what’s likely to be an area of risk, a place you’ll need to look at closely. this means you must send your people to industry-specific training, not just the cpe on accounting standards. things change quickly today, so you must ensure you and your team keep your fingers firmly on the pulse of any industries in which you specialize.
if you jump into a new industry, you’d better be ready to learn everything you possibly can. send your people to all the training in that industry they can attend. i’ve seen plenty of auditors get sued for bad business decisions. they thought they could take on this unique industry and get it right without wasting time understanding the industry. some are “lucky,” and their only punishment for taking on a client in a novel industry is getting reamed on peer review.
what are the repercussions if you don’t have expertise in a specific area? as an example, let’s look at employee benefit plan audits. this is an area that many firms view as super easy, something to use as projects to fill in holes in your schedule.
in 2014, the u.s. department of labor reviewed employee benefit plan audits for the 2011 plan year. they found that 39 percent had significant audit deficiencies. they also found that as the number of employee benefit plan audits a firm did decreased, the quality also dramatically slipped. for firms that did two or fewer per year, 75 percent of the audits had significant deficiencies.
as audit becomes more commoditized, developing an industry specialization is one of the best ways to set your firm apart from the competition. when you understand an industry, you can add insights to the client. you become a best practices connoisseur for that industry and can recommend operational and back-office improvements that can make a big difference to their bottom line. you see where the risks are and how to help your clients avoid them.
that industry expertise also means your fees can reflect the additional value you bring to a client’s audit. now, admittedly, those who decide solely on the basis of fees might not be willing to pay extra, but those aren’t the ones you want to work with. the ones you want to work with are the ones who want more than just an audit – they want assurance and advice.
several innovative firms have developed industry expertise to the extent that they have developed benchmarks among their clients for financial metrics. think how valuable it would be for clients to hear how they rank among their peers.
a great tool for understanding the client and the industry is the internet. gathering business insight is just one click away. you can quickly gather information about your client, their industry and the general business climate in the area where they operate.
this information can be used for two key purposes:
- to facilitate the identification of risk areas in planning the audit
- to gain business insight about the client and their industry
both are important to the audit process.the greater the insight about your client’s business, the better the audit approach and the greater the likelihood that you and the client can have a meaningful business discussion.
i’m continually surprised at how infrequently audit teams use the internet to gather information about their clients and their clients’ industries. this should be a routine step in planning every audit.
the amount of information that a business or organization puts on its website is growing exponentially. but that sheer volume of information can suck up a great deal of time when you are in random search mode. that’s why i recommend that auditors create a targeted and efficient online research plan that includes these items:
- client website
- industry association website
- media releases
- news articles about the client
- performance measures
- economic update in the client market area
to better focus your research, start out with the advanced search feature of the search engine. for example, because i always look for performance measures on my clients, i go to the advanced search page and type in the industry and key performance indicators.
another way to save time is to delegate this task to an administrative support person. provide a specific research plan and ask that your admin person provide you with links to the pertinent information.
this is also a reasonable task for a new staff person to perform to help them get up to speed on the crucial understandings they will need to be a valuable team member. it will certainly help them learn more than they can by filling out endless checklists.
understanding the standards
it is amazing, as i go around the country and talk to firms and staff, how little time we take to actually read the standards. we know that our methodology provider must have considered it and put the questions on the new standards somewhere in that checklist.
when we see a medical practitioner or a dentist, we assume they keep current with current best practices and any changes to the regulations governing their practices. i hope my medical practitioner or my dentist keeps current with the rules, especially the new ones, to keep patients safe in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. why should we not be held to a similar standard of keeping current and understanding new standards as they come out?
the leadership in a&a needs to drive the importance of quality into the fabric and culture of the firm by understanding the standards. most firms don’t challenge their people to understand the audit standards. holding staff accountable for understanding the standards really isn’t as daunting as most cpas seem to believe. we do that by ensuring the conversation with staff is not just focused on where the rule is on the form.
instead, let’s talk about the impact of this rule. let’s have frequent open-ended conversations about it so we understand the intent of the standard and how we, as a firm, will embrace it. this practice will innately build quality into your audit practice and create a team of better auditors.
i’ve talked to firms nationwide over the years, and they say, “great idea, al. we’ll get to it just as soon as we have time.” and of course, most firms don’t have time. but if you don’t make the time, then your firm will become a dinosaur.
auditing standards aren’t black and white. there’s a lot of room for interpretation and professional judgment. i won’t tell anybody not to comply with standards, but sometimes, you must consider the principle this standard is trying to cover. how does it apply to this context?
understanding how to audit
when i work with firms, i do what i call plain paper audit. i bring a bunch of seniors into the room, and they first ask, “where’s the manual?” i say that there’s no manual. there’s a notepad. and i have them write down how they would approach their audit.
two things happen when they are forced to write it down. first, ideas start surfacing from the back of their brain, and they realize that they know more than they give themselves credit for.
and second, writing it down helps them think it through. the one thing that is missing from checklists is the ability to think. we must give our staff the license, the opportunity and the responsibility to think.
if your staff cannot do a plain paper audit, you should build that into your culture. start with a lunch and learn, and sit down and say okay, here’s a blank notepad. write an audit program for inventory. write an audit program for investments. start getting them to think about what it is they’re doing.
weaving these four understandings into your approach to audit will make your audits immeasurably better. by understanding your client and their industry, you can make your audits relevant and provide value-added insights and services to your clients. when they see the added value, your firm stands out. you have the opportunity to make a difference in that business. you won’t be racing to the bottom for fees.
it makes you more business-minded so you can help your clients improve their businesses, while strengthening your own audit firm. because you understand the industry, you can see the ways that a client is doing better than the norm and areas that they can improve. understanding your client and the industry lowers the risk for your firm that the audit will miss something crucial. you make decisions on whether to accept an engagement from a position of strength because you’re not just trying to add more revenue to the top line.
the quality of your audits improves because you understand what the risky areas are and how to obtain the right amount of audit evidence. understanding risk for a particular client will help you become more comfortable with innovation because you know what your audit methodology needs to discover.
finally, by empowering your people to think deeply about their work, they’ll feel excited and engaged about their work, much more so than if they are bogged down in endless checklists. it makes the work more engaging and more interesting for your staff. and making the work more interesting is the key to making sure they actually stick around long enough to become leaders themselves. it means you build a team of the best and brightest because those people will want to come work for you.