Trainee auditor's blogs

Snow, buddies and exam results

20 January 2010

Happy new year! I've got some free time to update my blog because I'm the only person who made it into the office today due to all the snow. This week I was supposed to be carrying out some interim testing at a large Primary Care Trust. This means talking to people who work in various departments and testing the controls they have in place to make sure the financial information passing through the systems is still accurate and complete by the time it feeds into the annual accounts.

The NHS is the world's third-biggest employer, employing one in twenty-three of the working population in England alone, so a large chunk of their expenditure is on wages. When we look at the payroll system at a PCT we would make sure there are controls to ensure the right people get paid the correct amount each month. The 'wages' figure in the accounts will never be exactly right, but we want to be happy that it's 'materially correct' i.e. that it's not so wrong that it distorts the overall picture of the PCT's activities and expenditure over the last year.

I had a meeting with the new trainee that I 'buddy' yesterday – just to catch up and see how his first month or so with the Commission is going. He had all the same concerns I had when I joined the Commission – about taking ages to understand new pieces of work and getting used to the way we do things – but we were able to think of ways to make this easier like arranging more training on certain aspects of the audit and talking to his team leader about how best to support him.

Exam results for my second set of exams are out on the 29th so keep your fingers crossed for me! All ten of the trainees in my area are going out for dinner on Saturday night to celebrate. We work across two main sites so nights like this are a good opportunity for us all to catch up. One of the trainees in my office will be fully qualified if he passes this set of exams. One of the exams he sat in December was a six hour case study – it sounds absolutely terrifying to me but apparently college prepare you really well; you have several mock exams so you get used to concentrating for such a length of time and dealing with the pressure.

I'm also doing a piece of work at a County Council on the impact of the credit crunch which will feed into the Audit Commission's third report on the subject. We're trying to establish a better picture of how local authority finances and demand for services have been affected by the recession. So it's really topical, interesting stuff!

Posted by: NB