In which I am caught by "alert" auditors

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

What follows is a true story.

I work as a contractor supporting a US government agency. This morning our timesheets were audited.

It’s not a big deal really; they look over the timesheets and procedures to see if we’re ripping off the government. Since we aren’t, we just give them our timesheets and some of us get called in for an interview with the auditors.

I got called.

I went in and answered some pretty mundane questions (“are you salaried or exempt?”) and some that sounded more like traps (“do you have access to extra timesheets?” correct answer: no). All simple enough.

Then the auditor said carefully, “There’s some time missing from your timesheet. Can you explain it?”

“Where?” I asked, feeling alarmed.

She pushed the sheet over to me and I stared at it.

“Uh…what are you talking about?” I asked.

“Right there,” she tapped her finger firmly. “The 19th and 20th. You haven’t listed your hours.”

I paused. Surely this was a trick! I didn’t have access to a calendar, here in the small meeting room, but…

“The 19th and 20th? Wasn’t that the weekend?” I tried to sound helpful and not sarcastic.

Frowning, the lead auditor leaned over and conferred with her colleague for a moment.

“I don’t normally work weekends,” I added, in case they thought the agency did.

“Thank you for your time,” she said, without expression.

That’s how it went down…I couldn’t believe it. These people are getting paid for their precision and attention to detail in accurately auditing what days we work…for a federal agency that is closed on weekends…and they actually tried to pull a gotcha on me…apparently completely unaware of what days the 19th and 20th actually were.

Their inability to glance at a calendar before starting was compounded by their stupidity in not realizing that ALL the timesheets in their pile (perhaps I was the first interview?) showed those two days blank; and neither inability nor stupidity explain their presumption that any blank spot on the timesheet automatically meant I was at fault.

Your tax dollars at work!

Sailboat

2

I work in private industry, and all auditors are like this.

I’ve concluded that this is where the accountants and fresh-faced MBAs are assigned by the consulting firms when they aren’t qualified to do anything else.

3

The term you’re looking for here is “failing up”.

4

If you had answered incorrectly you probably would have saved your company money, since auditors need to find something wrong. Usually as soon as they find them they can end their audit.

5

The auditors assigned to my company took 9 months to do last year’s annual audit. 3 months later, they’re back. As far as I can tell, their job is to occupy a conference room and ask for arbitrary breakdowns of things that can’t be quantified. But I probably have more to learn on the subject…

6

My auditor stories:

Story the first:

As a green engineer out of college, I worked for a well known avionics supplier. One of my early assignments was to fill in for a female engineer, we’ll call her Jane Dominatrix,* while she took time off for her wedding and honeymoon. She married another engineer who had recently been transfered from our department (and who I replaced). We’ll call him Jim Stargun.

At some point I had to write a change order for Jane’s black box. (avionics, you pervs!). So I filled in the “Project Engineer” box on the form with “J. Dominatrix”. It was a print, then sign sort of thing, so it was waiting for her signature when she got back. She crossed out what I had written and wrote in “J. Stargun”.

A few days later, I get a call to see the DCAS auditor.

“Jill Dominatrix is listed as the Project Engineer, Why did Jim Stargun sign this CO?”

“No, That’s Jill. Jim and Jill got married.”

“Just 'cause they are married doesn’t mean Jim can sign for her!”

I made the mistake of laughing. This REALLY pissed off the auditor, and it took perhaps another 5 minutes before I could make him understand the source of his confusion, and he held a grudge ever after…which leads to
Story the second (kinda long, sorry about that):

One of my jobs was to diagnose and repair failed avionics boxes that were returned for repair. Some of these were out of warranty.

Out of warranty repairs were a major pain in the ass. The way it was supposed to work was I was supposed to determine ALL the failed electrical components, and submit a list of needed parts to the USAF. The USAF would then source these parts, send them to me, and I would repair the box. With purchasing, and other bureaucratic delays, this only took, say 4-6 months to turn around a box. The idea was to avoid $500 toilet seat fiascoes.

Nobody was ever able to make the USAF understand that it is not usually possible to determine ALL the failed parts until the KNOWN failed parts have been replaced. Part A’s output supplies part B’s input, so if A is not working, it is often impossible to determine if B is working or not.

So what usually happened is that we would find one problem, and guess at all the downstream parts that might also be bad, and order those too. This resulted in extra parts cost, and extra labor cost, and sometimes we were too conservative, and this then required yet another 4-6 month cycle or two. In the meantime we have Generals on the phone wanting to know why it is taking so long to repair their equipment.

It turns out that what usually failed in my box were some difficult to source, but not very expensive transistors.

What I started doing, was pulling parts from inventory and fixing the damn box. Then I’d send in a request for the $10 worth of parts I’d used. The day those parts showed up, I’d run a final test on the box, and ship it out the next day. Saved the USAF money (no unnecessary repairs) and time (no extra procurement iterations). Everyone was delighted with our “speedy” service.

Problem 1: There was no way for me to put the AF supplied parts back into inventory. They ended up in my desk drawer. Problem 2: I was using 100 or so transistors a year to make these repairs. This exceeded the projected need for spares, so my factory test techs eventually couldn’t get parts to fix problems that were found. No problem, I’ve got a whole drawer full of them.

BIG PROBLEM: On paper anyway, I am now taking parts supplied and owned by the USAF, installing them in new equipment and selling them back.

BIGGER PROBLEM: Somehow the aforementioned auditor, who had a hard on for me anyway, got wind of this.

So I was in the wrong. However, everyone, except the aforementioned auditor, could see that
A) There was zero, or beneficial financial impact to the Air force.
B) My way made a hell of a lot of sense.
C) There was absolutely no way to change the system so that I could keep doing it.

So I got a reprimand in my personnel file, and an apology and a sweet assignment from my section head.
*Any resemblance to real name is intentional.

7

I used to be an auditor. There are people who choose to be auditors and who are highly intelligent and are willing to think about the things they’re asking. Don’t paint all auditors with the same brush. I chose to be in that field - and I chose to leave it as well,

That said, there are those who don’t have the common sense to realize that what they’re asking isn’t a reasonable question. Like the coworker I was doing an IT audit with who kept insisting that he had to see the firewall. No amount of explaining (from me or from the IT folks) got him to understand that the firewall was software that you couldn’t see. Finally they showed him the server that it was on and told him it was there.

8

Oh, I’m aware I’m generalizing. I’m also aware that there have to be some qualified and intelligent auditors out there.

Somewhere.

Please don’t take it personally. I just haven’t yet encountered a single one who had a clue what the fuck they were doing.

9

I was 24 years old and a surprisingly high level manager over the distribution and procurement software for a billion dollar supermarket chain. I knew the systems and the underlying databases inside and out and a lot of the structure and concepts were complex and usually took months to understand.

One day, in walks an auditor about my young age and hands me a list of requests. It consisted of dumps of tons of data but the problem was that everything he (and the overall auditing team) wanted to do was logically flawed and would produce results that were misleading to uninterpretable.

The next time he stopped by, I told him that all the requests were flawed and I wouldn’t do them. He switched into auditor mode which is a cross between a state trooper and an accountant. I said, Ok, we would go down the list and I would ask him to clarify every request. Two hours later, he was so confused and hopeless after I pointed out every flaw I could find on what they wanted to do. I then called my boss who was an Executive VP and told him they weren’t doing their homework and bothering people. They were more cooperative after than.

In my next job two years later, I new `parts of the big corps systems better than anyone. In walks a young twenty-something auditor and the cycle repeated.