Trainee auditor's blogs

NHS Trusts, exams and a dressing down

23 June 2009

“Right- its been a while since I last spoke to you fine people so we may as well have a catch up – its June – and its sunny!!! A lot has happened in the last few months – NHS Trusts, Exams, Dressing Down from line manager, oh fun times!

Ok let’s start from the beginning.

Firstly NHS health accounts. For those who don’t know – unlike companies whose financial year end can be any date of the year, the public sector has a fixed year end, and conveniently it falls in the weeks preceding the start of exam leave … fun times. Auditing the different sectors – whether its health, local government or fire and police services really opens your eyes to the different, sector specific financial targets and requirements. Sound interesting – well its all we have as auditors!

What hits you about the public sector is because all of your clients are huge organisations turning over many £100s millions each year, it is clear that as you progress you will eventually specialise in a specific area – no one can possibly know everything about the public sector audit. However what is beneficial is that at least you get great variety when you first start out.

After health accounts you move onto exam leave. Not much to say other than – aagggghhh! Ok its not that bad however it is always stressful. With health accounts prior you are working hard for a prolonged period of time. At the time of writing I am still waiting for results – will be touch and go – hopefully I’ve pulled through. Would prefer not to retake. We will see.

After exams I return back to my local government client. I receive a bit of a dressing down/debrief after my health client work – we’ll have to say a few lessons needed to be learnt after a chaotic/rushed audit – given the little time I’ve been let off the hook but been given a few pointers for the future.

In fairness the audit manager was quite fair in her feedback – she understood the workload was tough and that time was short given the very short period we had to complete the audit. Feedback from your work is a regular occurrence for all trainees. You get regular progress reports; whilst you want to ensure that you get positive feedback, you do get learning points from audits to bring forward for the future – I got quite a few here!

Anyway – I got to go – work calls. I will chat to you all very soon. See you in July”.

Posted by: LW