create deeper audit relevance by diving into your client’s business … in the actual business.
by alan anderson, cpa
transforming audit for the future
once your team understands the critical role planning plays in creating a foundation for audits and how that enables your team to have the mental bandwidth to deliver relevance, it’s time to focus on other ways to develop a relevance culture in your firm.
more: know your three audit w’s | five ways to prevent audit bottlenecks | how do we drive relevance in audit? | lack of relevance drives audit commoditization | four basic understandings every auditor must master | wanted: great audit mentors | closing the audit expectations gap
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at the planning stage, set out the expectation that everyone will add value to the audit by identifying areas where the client can improve. one way to do this is to assign each audit team member the task of interviewing someone outside of accounting who has something to do with their audit area. have your team members ask this person these five questions and write up a summary of what they learned:
- what is your role in the organization?
- in your view, what is the greatest strength of your area or department?
- in your view, what is your area or department’s greatest opportunity for improvement?
- in your view, what is your company’s greatest strength?
- in your view, what is your company’s best opportunity for improvement?
at the end of the audit, hold an open-ended conversation with the whole team about what they learned about the client’s business. start by discussing what everyone learned in their interviews. cement the learning by asking everyone, starting with the newest team members, to complete this sentence:
“if i were running this business, i would ______________.”
asking this question gets your team out of the weeds of the accounting standards and forces them to put on a business-minded hat and think like a businessperson. performing this exercise with every engagement will give your team a better understanding of the client’s business. it helps them become better auditors, and it helps your team add value to the audit by identifying meaningful ideas to discuss with the client.
another easy way to deepen your team’s understanding of the client and their business is to tell your staff to leave the conference room where they’re working. make it part of your standard operating procedure that they can’t send an email when they’re at the client’s office – they have to go and talk to that person.
make it a clear expectation that your people need to talk to somebody other than the bookkeeper. how can you really audit inventory if you’re not seeing what’s happening out in production? encourage them to talk to the production manager and have those conversations about how they do their work and what their concerns are. this takes time but is key to truly understanding the client’s business and adding relevance.
for remote audits, instead of sending an email, send an invite for a quick video meeting via zoom, teams or facetime with the person for whom you have questions. make sure both sides have cameras on. you need to have a face-to-face conversation. you can also request that the person take their phone with them and take you on a video chat tour of the warehouse or another part of the business. you will probably find that this takes less time than composing and sending an email, especially when the person on the other end doesn’t quite understand the question.
you can learn a lot once you leave the conference room. years ago, i walked around the property for a tractor cab manufacturing client my firm was auditing. i was with the controller and the production manager, and we were getting organized for the annual inventory observation. this row of completed tractor cabs was on pallets outside one of the buildings.
i asked the controller when these cabs were manufactured. he hemmed and hawed a bit and then said last month. the production manager laughed aloud and said, “good grief, gary, there are volunteer trees growing up through the pallets into the inside of the cabs. these have been here for at least three years.”
i had noticed the trees myself, which is why i asked the question. i knew they had to be old and likely obsolete. as a result, i focused my inventory steps on obsolescence and recommended they implement a better inventory management process to avoid excess and obsolete inventory.
another time, i was walking through a manufacturing client’s shop floor and saw a guy at a punch press machine who was punching out parts. so i asked him, “what are you making?” and he said, “i’m making scrap.”
“scrap? they look like parts to me.” he answered, “well, we don’t need these parts. so they’ll be scrap.” when i asked him why he made them, he told me his boss would get some bonus for keeping the shop crew busy.
so i immediately returned and realized that the production manager’s bonus plan was based on direct labor employed and didn’t differentiate between charging time to produce necessary parts or charging time for unnecessary parts. a well-intended compensation plan incentivized bad behavior when the production manager found a way to work it to his advantage.
if i had stayed in the conference room or only talked to the finance department, no one would have known any better. i would have just looked at the numbers and determined that the bonus was calculated properly.
another reason to get out of the conference room is to prevent fraud. fraud inquiries are too limited if we only talk to the cfo and the controller, but we never go out and talk to the shop floor to see how inventory could slip out the back way. we don’t build that into our checklists.