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Auditors don’t hate you for no reason. They have the tricky job for being (formally) responsible for signing off on practices they know too little about, get sh

by wjnc 5y ago

Auditors don’t hate you for no reason. They have the tricky job for being (formally) responsible for signing off on practices they know too little about, get shitty documentation for while not getting enough time to understand. To make matters worse they get paid a lot, but get paid by the people they audit whom fire them for withholding signatures. Looking at firms they they think “why do they always send me the wrong documents, at the wrong time while withholding the documents I need and only bringing them up when I’ve escalated the matter to the board”. It’s a crazy relationship from both sides. Honestly, as a free market person with 15 years working with auditors I sometimes think that external audits need less market and more intervention. Then I remember most government oversight is even less effective. Every government agency (EU / NL) I know of is both awed by a big-4 rubber stamp and an avid consumer of big-4 hours. My humble conclusion is that oversight is a hard human problem.

andrewflnr 5y ago
> responsible for signing off on practices they know too little about... Ok, well, there's the problem. Or at least most of it. No one should be even considered to audit a system unless they understand how it works.
- raesene9 5y ago
  Aand there's a problem :) So if you consider the size of most audit teams relative to the size of the IT departments they audit, how do the auditors become subject matter experts in all the different types of technology in use in the organization? It's a tricky problem. One option is to audit against "known standards" but that's often a horrible hack as the standards themselves need maintained and with more cutting edge technologies (think the rise of cloud native) the standards may not even have been written yet (or are hard to maintain as the underlying tech evolves so quickly) Another option is to rely on external companies (e.g. the Big-4) but they don't have any more ways of getting large pools of SMEs in all the different technologies either (despite what their sales people might tell you).

by wjnc 5y ago

andrewflnr 5y ago

> responsible for signing off on practices they know too little about... Ok, well, there's the problem. Or at least most of it. No one should be even considered to audit a system unless they understand how it works.

raesene9 5y ago
Aand there's a problem :) So if you consider the size of most audit teams relative to the size of the IT departments they audit, how do the auditors become subject matter experts in all the different types of technology in use in the organization? It's a tricky problem. One option is to audit against "known standards" but that's often a horrible hack as the standards themselves need maintained and with more cutting edge technologies (think the rise of cloud native) the standards may not even have been written yet (or are hard to maintain as the underlying tech evolves so quickly) Another option is to rely on external companies (e.g. the Big-4) but they don't have any more ways of getting large pools of SMEs in all the different technologies either (despite what their sales people might tell you).