Life of an auditor

Given the volume of people leaving the firms for greener pastures, I started thinking about the reasoning behind why people at different levels within the firm leave. So let's give this a shot... 1) First year associate - You go, WTF is this job? You realize that this is not the career or field, let alone the job, for you. You realize your calling is nursing, teaching in an elementary school, running a store, or something on those lines. This is when you leave, or should leave. 2) Second year-third year associate - You complete two years at the firm. You cannot deal with the hours, and your main priority is a good work-life balance. You'd rather be an accountant at a company, and have your own desk and 9-5 hours. This is when you leave, or should leave. 3) First senior associate year- You now have senior year under your belt. You probably have your CPA by now. The offers are pouring in. You hate the salary you're getting paid. You went through a really difficult year and st...

And here we go.... We're in that time of year when rumors are swirling about compensation increases and ratings. Some firms have already told their employees. Their friends at other firms hear the increases and then gossip with their peers. It then filters up and down the ranks. The speculation you hear is non-stop and is noise for the most part. I've heard ranges as low as 5% and as ridiculous as 25%. Gotta love the staff associates during these times. The funny thing is that the firms have lowered the bar so much last year than even a 5-8% raise for staff associates would make some of them happy. Have to give credit to the firms for successfully pulling off this heist. Ratings are another big discussion point at the firm. It's funny how people sometimes try to glean information about ratings without being too direct. For the most part, you hear complaints about how people get shafted by the ratings committees. The primary complaint is that the reviews don't reflect th...

" I wanted to know if it is possible to join a different business stream if you don't like audit after a year or so. For example are there opportunities to move into Consulting or Financial Advisory? Also how closely do you work with other business streams, and do you end up having good working knowledge of what exactly they do?" Good questions. Question 1 - If you don't like audit after a year or so, you'll just join many of the disgruntled associates who end up staying in audit for some more time. The way it's set up, you can only really transfer into other non-audit groups after 4-5 years in audit. As far as consulting goes, consider Deloitte, since the other 3 firms spun off their consulting groups after the whole Enron scandal. The other groups have an implicit understanding with their audit brethren so they don't steal employees within a year or two after they join. Put the time in and you have a better shot. There are exceptions, and they'll try...

Sorry for the hiatus, been busy at work. Wanted to link to a really good article in CFO Magazine, this was a link pointed out by a reader. Touches on what I blogged about earlier on budgets, and how Companies now have the upper hand in fee negotiations. This is just not right, and leads to partners cutting fees and costs to be somewhat profitable. The audit teams end up getting affected by this immensely. Not only are our raises not decent, but the budgeted hours we're given to complete audits is absolutely unrealistic. We also end up taking clients we have no business auditing, since the firms have certain basic standards and expectations of clients, and many startups just do not have the accounting staff to achieve and maintain these standards. This is just a downward spiral, and hopefully, for the sake of the firms, they will gain the upper hand in negotiations in the near future, and focus on actually doing a better job auditing in the near future.

The competition amongst the firms are getting tougher, and I really don't like what it's doing to the auditing model. Firms are coming in and under-cutting other firms by offering the audit at half the price of the current audit fees charged by the existing firm. First off, there's a constant pressure on budgets, and the firms keep adding checklists after checklists and other necessary procedures to opine on an audit, effectively telling us to do more work in less time. Like the Wolf says in Pulp Fiction, "That's thirty minutes away, I'll be there in ten". Secondly, given the lack of new clientele, firms are going in and undercutting each other like crazy. It's not like our budgets or our fees for that matter are too high. I mean, take a look at the invoices you pay your law firms. I don't hear any complaining there. Look, I like competition, I'm all for being efficient. But this industry isn't like a grocery store - we sell cheap, so sho...

If you're sitting across the table from me, and I know you're fooling around on your blackberry or on gchat because you have a big ass smile on your face while auditing, (so you're definitely not working), and you do that for a decent amount of time, and I keep pushing you every half an hour, asking how the work is coming along, would I turn into someone you hate? Probably, but it's really annoying because team members should know that if they are slow, it slows the whole team down, and it precludes us from leaving at a decent time every day. Come on people, focus a little. I don't want to be here as much as you do.

You know those times when the mgr leaves the room and the team quickly gets talking about non-work stuff and yaks and yaks until the mgr gets back. Being on the other side of the coin is a weird feeling. When you walk out, the room is dead quiet. As you're walking into the room, you'll interrupt a chatterfest that suddenly dies,with people staring at their screens again. So you think - a) Did i give them enough review notes that they now use me to gang up and bond and chat about - b) Do they feel much more relaxed now that I'm not in the room so they can use this opportunity to chat it up? I'm hoping it's B, but oh well, might just give them additional review notes instead of doing it myself. As long as they're doing work, I don't care if they're using an image of me as a dartboard. Heck, teams need something to bond over, and it's always that one mgr/snr mgr/partner we use to yak about. Use me, as long as i see your signoff on a decent workpaper, I...