Trainee auditor's blogs

Big presentations and performance based work

6 April 2009

Another month goes by and yes – another blog! It’s been an interesting month, including progress assessments at college, my year end appraisal, and the beginning of some new work at a new health client. Fun fun!

Ok so the latest and greatest ... I’ve slowly wound down my work at my existing health client. Much of the financial audit work have been completed to date at this stage and we now collate the information and findings into an interim report, identifying risks and issues with financial systems. This isn’t really numbers per se, but rather understanding the organisation and how it works. Good for anyone wanting to restructure a business in the future. But anyway – we have a number of findings, and we report them to the senior members of the Primary Care Trust – usually the audit committee including Chief Executive, Director of Finance, Trustees etc. After that it’s simply a case of waiting for the final accounts where I end up testing the figures. This won’t happen till early May.

I’ve also been back to my Local Government client where I was invited to say a few words about an audit which I completed back in October, and where I was invited to answer a few questions on any issues arising from the audit. This audit focused on analysing performance of the London Borough. To cut a long story short public sector organisations produce a whole plethora of information, much financial, and a significant amount of it is non-financial, focusing on value for money, outcomes of spending money on projects, and a huge amount of our work assesses the latter as part of our role. It’s great, because we don’t just focus on financial audit per se – but also the performance side of the borough.

My report focused on a number of performance indicators which are released by the borough, and I was invited to the audit committee to say a few words. The Audit committee for a London borough has all the big wigs – Director of Finance, and a number of elected councillors as well as members of the finance team.

Invited to these committees often means a late night, but it does open your eyes to the impact your work has on elected members. I had a clarify a number of points to the committee and I’d be lying if I didn’t say the heart rate increased a notch or two, but all in all it was a great experience, and at a mere 9.45pm, and after missing the Man U – Inter Milan game, I was on my way home.

I’ve also moved to a new client, which means, more learning. Part of this job is often the unpredictability of knowing where you may – or may not be. Often your work is dependent on whether the client is ready to have you. Needless to say – they weren’t entirely here and it’s taken a while to bed down.

I’m undertaking performance based work here – first time for everything – based on managing risk. This is hard graft, involving interviewing clients and effectively analysing documents. I know now what its like to be a fraud investigator. This side of the audit is challenging in a very different sense – it requires you to make conclusions through analysing quite complex elements of information; a lot of pressure rides on your judgements – a low score has implications for the management of the organisation; a high score can lead to increased funding, and reputational kudos. This work is still ongoing as we speak.

I also had my year end assessment and performance review from my line manager. We had a chat and analysed where I’ve come over the past year. Its been interesting, a number of highs, and a number of learning and development points. All in all it went well and I got a good score. I’m happy.

Anyway – that rounds it up for this month. The next month sees me back at Local Government, and preparing for my mock exams at college. Rock on!

Posted by: LW