Now I know we all make typos, but I’ve been in a situation today which has really hacked me off. My job has been made unnecessarily difficult because two employees of an international bank couldn’t be bothered to spell check their correspondence before they sent it off.

As part of the audit of a pension scheme, we have to comment on the internal governance and control of the investment managers who hold the scheme’s assets. Normally this is just a formality. These banks and institutions have a report published every year in which a large firm of accountants will certify that everything is hunky-dory. We obtain a copy, review it, and put a note on the file to say it’s all cool.

The only complication is that these reports take a long time to produce. So, in this instance, an investment manager has sent me a report saying their controls were fine up to 31 December 2006. Because I’m auditing the period from 6 April 2007 to 5 April 2008 this isn’t good enough, but no matter – I simply emailed them to ask for confirmation that there had been no changes in control since the date on the report. This is normally a simple, five minute procedure. They are supposed to rely in writing that nothing has changed, I print the email and stick it on the file, we all forget about it.

See below the response I received:

I can confirm that there have been weakening of controls from the date of the internal controls report to 5 April 2008

That has to be a typo, right? We can’t sign off our audit report without confirming, so I emailed the woman back. See the response I just received.

The investments are free from charge or lien, and there have been now weakening of controls

The first message is blatently a typo, and the second message is blatently also a typo… but I just spoke to the manager about it and we both agreed that it won’t stand up in court and I need to email a third time to try and get a confirmation which is typo-free!

Tags: typos

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 4:32 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.