What can you learn from a list of common auditor mistakes?

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You might learn a few things from a list of Forty Mistakes Auditors Make. If you can identify a few ways to improve your audit approach you could save time, improve the quality of your audit, and maybe reduce your risk.

Lots of auditors are in the midst of planning their year-end audits and reviews. Now would be a really good time to think about how to do better, more efficient work.

Writing at CPA Scribo, my friend Charles Hall outlines a number of goofs made by auditors. I’ll list a few tidbits in order to encourage you to read and ponder the whole list:

  • We don’t properly consider and document our independence.
  • We don’t appropriately price the engagement which leads to unattainable time budgets.
  • We keep doing the same thing year after year after year (and then complain we have too much time in the job).
  • We perform no (real) risk assessment.
  • We don’t link identified risks to our audit plans.
  • We don’t (really) have an engagement team discussion.
  • We don’t tailor our audit programs.
  • We get on and off the same engagement too many times, losing momentum and wasting time.

If you recognize any of those factors present in your engagements, you have the opportunity to do better work and save money.

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