Skip to main content

so, what do you do?

"So, what do you for a living?"
I hesitated, struggled to come up with an answer, then said that I worked for a certain Big 4 firm. "Nice, so what exactly do you do?" Damn, looks like that didn't answer the question. "I ummm...I audit." It has been historically proven that there is a 98% chance the person has no idea what auditing really entails. I have to try again. "Accounting..Public Accounting."
"Ahh..",the person goes," taxes and such." What a douche. "Umm...yea..sure, taxes."
Then there are times when I actually feel the need to explain it to them. "No, well, see...you know how companies have financial statements. Now, we have to look over and make sure everything's okay." At this point, I'm spoonfeeding them, hoping that they get the gist. If they don't, I'll just give up and say..yea, taxes.
Seriously, come on people, you have to know what auditing is. If you want US Weekly type scandals to get you to read about it, read about the Enron scandal, maybe that will help.
Just the other day, I was at the dentist's, and I ask for an appointment on saturday six months from now since it hits our "busy season" and it'll be tough to pull off a weekday. And she goes..."tax season." Yeah, I nod, tax season.

Comments

Anonymous said…
My life. Right there. Sometimes I just start making a different job up because I really do not want to explain it.
notfordisplay said…
I guess that's what I have to start doing. Consulting? Bartending? Or Maybe I can say I work for Discovery Channel or something, as a producer of Shark Week.
Anonymous said…
I had fun explaining it to 16 year olds and younger when I started.

Doing some heavy SOX stuff at the time, I likened to administering a vaccine.

Since then I've transitioned to defending the capitalist system. If you think about it, that's what you do. A Champion of Capitalism, if you will.
This is so hilarious - it is amazing how we all go through this!
Anonymous said…
Try explaining auditing to a 7 year old and a 4 year old.

"Mommy helps other people find out how much money they have and how much they have spent"
Anonymous said…
Dude your blog is so hilarious...very entertaining and really sums up the life of an auditor. Keep it coming!

Popular posts from this blog

ADP/Payroll

Just realized that the very payroll/adp reports we all enjoyed looking at in order to see how much our client contacts made, now seem to piss me off. Especially when your main contact, who couldn't tell a debit from a credit, makes significantly more than you, and leaves at 5. It's almost guaranteed to get you in a foul mood and yak with your team about the ridiculous salaries that certain employees get when compared to yours.

should you choose to audit financial services?

I'm trying to decide whether to audit financial services companies or non-financial services companies. What would you say are the pros and cons of either industries? Do individuals who choose non-FS have less career mobility within the firm or if they decide not to stay with the B4 after a few years? Really depends on what you'd like to do after (unless you really love auditing). If you want to a controller,etc. at a p/e firm or a hedge fund down the road, you'd want to go into financial services. The pay won't be too bad, especially if you get a share of the insane bonuses they dole out. If you want to audit industries with tangible products and want to get a better understanding of the operations of such businesses, then other industries are the way to go.In terms of mobility outside the firm, auditing other industries is the way to go since you have plenty of options when you exit the audit world. For example, in 2008, after Lehman collapsed, it was incredibly hard

auditing vs consulting

I was wondering if you could break down the career opportunities in auditing and consulting (in a big 4). I know that consulting pays more in a big 4 and has more interesting work, but it seems that auditing has extremely good exit opportunities (Financial controller, CFO etc). Any thoughts on which is better in the long run? Well there's different consulting services offered by public accounting companies - the most popular being IT consulting and risk consulting. There are also other consulting services offered, but these two hire the most. Do they pay more? Yes, but not by much. Not enough for you to say: Shoot, the $$ is a huge reason for me to move over. Is the work more interesting than audit? Yes. You're actually looking over a company's processes and telling them what to do instead of what not to do (audit). Everyone I know who's made the switch likes it waay better than audit. In the long run though, choosing audit vs consulting really depends on what you want