On this page I discuss my opinions about audits. I have seen a trend that I consider excessivley costly and a disuasion for modelers to be creative. I have heard many stories that a particular method of modelling should be used to satisfy auditors. I think you should rebel against this and advocate for an efficiet process that does not waste time and make your life misrable. The process involves making lists and having auditors tabulating lists and seeming to be proud of counting the number of items to comment on. This way they can show how much work they have done. In fact they have done nothing but make extra irrelevant work. The auditing process should uncover real items rather than what amounts to proof-reading.
Auditing or Proofreading
The auditors use some kind of program to check basic things like copying columns accross the row. Some of the programs may be more advanced and check if a formula is referring to blanks.
It would have been so much more efficient to handle this with a short call. Sometimes it seems that you are tabulating these items that are analaogous to proof-reading a report or a book. The proof reader typically does not count the number of items that they have found such as the number of commas added. Most important, this auding process has not uncovered problems that we have found ourselves.
Agreed. The very last column was not included in the sum column. This probably occured from copying the SUM functions one colum to the left. Of course there is not effect of this in terms of the use of the model by management anywhere in the model. To assure that this kind of minor cosmetic issue does not occur in the future, we have put the final column of the spreadsheet — XFD in the SUM functions. It must have taken time to tabluate all of the columns with one single columnn at the end and then write-up the linking error. It took more time for us to read your comments, write this repsponse and change the model. Finally, as we want to assure the last column in the SUM function, we have other staff verifying the change. This all has a cost and is a highly inefficient way to address such a minor item. We suggest developing a way to address this kind of extremely minor cosmetic issue.
Agree. We have deleted the blank title and left in the row. Of course there is no effect on the model. It would have been so much more efficient to handle this with a short call. Sometimes it seems that you are tabulating these items and believe that the more cosmetic items that are found the better job you are doing. This is not the case, as this auding process has not uncovered problems that we have found ourselves.
Examples of Passive Agressiveness to Auditors who Waste Your Time
