4 answers
Harrison’s Answer
I am a business data analyst, not an auditor, but I believe the work style is similar. I am working on solving a lot of quantitative problems for my company administrators. Among those, there are SQL data query, modeling, forecasting, statistical tests, and model improvement. As an analyst, we are facilitating and suggesting the business to make decisions rationally with systematic analysis of quantitative evidence. Similar positions, such as auditor, accountant, data scientist/engineer, and reporting specialist, normally require a strong mathematical/econometrics background and a good intuition of data and statistics.
Sherry’s Answer
Rachael’s Answer
Hi Deja,
As an auditor of private companies, I was at the client site during the course of my audit work. The day would typically consist of working through my testing areas. Achieving this would require working with the client contact to obtain the necessary support from the people within the company in charge of these areas (i.e. payroll testing support would be provided by the payroll manager). This support would be used to complete and verify the testing necessary for the engagement team to gain comfort over this area. The reasons I enjoyed audit were due to the detail- and task-oriented nature of the work, the aspect of teamwork working with the other members of engagement team to complete the audit, and the client-facing aspect of being onsite-interactive and immersed in the client's company.
Richard’s Answer
The day to day work for an auditor can vary widely based on a number of things, including: type of auditor (internal/external), specialization (finance, IT, investments, healthcare, etc), specific responsibilities (audit work, annual audit planning), and more.
Some common things would be:
- Meeting with clients to obtain an understanding of the business process and controls for the particular audit being performed
- Assessing risk associated to business processes and preparing & performing test steps to assess the effectiveness of controls.
- Working with clients to communicate test findings and monitoring any actions needed to address control issues.
But depending on the particular company/job, you can also find yourself:
- traveling to domestic and international locations to perform audit work
- working with a team of auditors to perform the audit work
- meeting with various levels of management to understand growing issues in the company and plan audits to review controls in that area
- perform forensic investigations on fraud cases raised to your team
- develop robotics, machine learning and other data analysis programs to provide comprehensive coverage in your testing and monitoring of risks
- and many more
Audit provides a wide range of opportunities and your day to day will vary depending on the type of audit career you pursue.