I must apologise for the severe lack of blogging which has taken place at this blog over the past few weeks. I confess that I have never liked the month of January, since childhood having found it the most depressing month of the year, and these days my January is a complete and utter write-off by virtue of the fact that I am obliged to spend it in Wantage.

I could write at great and tedious length about how much I hate the town of Wantage. If you saw it yourself, you might not think there was anything particularly objectionable about it, but if I add it up now I have spent no fewer than 14 weeks in this place over the course of the past few years, and it has begun to become wearing. The attractions of Wantage are severely limited, the highlight being a small branch of Waitrose which stocks an extensive selection of approximately six different sandwiches. Compare this to the even smaller branch of Boots, which stocks approximately three different sandwiches, and you have covered the entire lunchtime eating possibilities of the town in one fell swoop. That is to say, there is also an independent sandwich shop where in days gone by I confess that I have made the occasional purchase, but a colleague subsequently pointed out some of their rather unhygienic food practices to me, and after that I began to view it more as a health hazard than a nutritional opportunity. Apart from the afore-mentioned shops, the town boasts a small newsagents which admittedly sells Wispas, a statue of Alfred the Cake, and the only hotel I have encountered in my entire life that I would refuse to stay in ever again. Impressive.

Perhaps I wouldn’t have taken against Wantage so much, were it not for the fact that it is the home of my most troublesome client. Due to some complicated US stock exchange regulations which are beyond my understanding, the UK manufacturing company which I audit needs to have its audit report signed off by the end of January. Bearing in mind that the client year end is December 31st, the accounts team didn’t come back off holiday until January 6th, and the audit started on January 15th, it’s perhaps not difficult to understand why I turned up on the first day to find that they hadn’t even had time to open the extensive list of required information which we had sent to them before Christmas, much less to actually prepare any of it Hmmm. Things were so bad on the first day that we actually considered coming back home again, but in the end my superior decided that it would be better for us to remain on site so that we could maintain pressure on the client to get stuff done.

It sounded like a good idea in theory, but in reality trying to put pressure on an already stressed client to get stuff done is not very much fun at all The whole matter was complicated somewhat by the fact that the very competent financial accountant which the entity used to employ left at the end of October. She was replaced by a woman in respect of whom it would require a great stretch of imagination to describe as competent. In fact, as the audit progressed over the course of the next three weeks, we began to doubt whether she could even be described as an accountant. Without wishing to be unduly rude and offensive, it is nevertheless true that she was found via a recruitment agency and offered the permanent position after a couple of weeks, however nearly two months later the company still hasn’t managed to obtain her references. She assures me that there is a good reason for this, and proceeded to tell me a very long and complicated story which involved her immediate superior being struck down by a brain tumour and regrettably losing his memory, but combined with her apparently extreme lack of accounting ability, it began to sound a little suspicious!

I have to say that despite the fact that this woman is outwardly perfectly pleasant, she is one of the only clients ever to come close to reducing me to tears. Right from the start I felt as if I was fighting a losing battle against her. Every day I would go to speak to her and explain to the best of my ability what it was that I required. Now I know I am not a person with the world’s best communication skills, but in my defense I have to say that I do not normally have problems communicating with my clients, and having worked at this particular factory so many times already, I was fairly confident that I knew exactly what I was asking for and what I could expect to receive. It would, however, have been more satisfying to try communicating with a brick wall. It felt like whatever I said to this woman, she managed to misunderstand. Every time I asked her a question, she answered a different one, or started by answering something akin to my question but then went off at a random tangent telling me about her family, her life, how much better her last job was than this one, how she thinks the woman who did this job before her was hopeless, etc, etc etc. As a result, it would be very easy for me to write a report on her son’s love life, explaining all about how his ex-wife married someone else, got divorced for a second time, and then moved in with a woman, but it would be far more challenging for me to write down anything sensible which this woman managed to communicate to me about her US GAAP adjustments I’ve never encountered anything quite like it – she was an absolute nightmare!

Even now, I’m not entirely sure whether she is utterly, completely stupid, or whether she was just being deliberately obstructive. I’m inclining towards the view that she was being deliberately obstructive, purely because of an incident which happened on the first Wednesday. The first Wednesday was a good week into the audit, seeing as how we started on a Thursday, and so by this stage it was reasonably expected that we would have accomplished quite a lot of audit testing. For this reason, my supervisor had come down from Birmingham for the day to assess the progress we were making. I was exceptionally stressed already, because the progress we were making was nowhere near the sort of progress she expected we should have been making, the client being half the problem and the other problem being someone I’ll talk about a bit later! We had genuinely been working very hard, but there didn’t seem like there was a lot to show for it. I was trying to explain to the supervisor just how difficult the client was being, without making it sound like I intensely disliked her or as if I was trying to make excuses for my own under-achievement. Unfortunately, the client obviously realised that my supervisor was an important person who shouldn’t be messed around, and chose Wednesday to be on her best behaviour. I nearly choked, when after a week of being utterly uncooperative whenever I so much as asked her for a bank statement, she started making the effort to walk down two flights of stairs to provide the piece of paper my supervisor had asked for. It kind of diminished the credibility of what I was trying to say That was annoying enough, but it was at 5.30 that the piece de resistance came! I had been trying, for an entire week now, to obtain a very important spreadsheet called the Reserves Reconciliation. If you don’t know a lot about accounting then this probably won’t mean much to you, but this spreadsheet was supposed to reconcile the value of the client’s profit and loss reserve per their own local trial balance to the value of their profit and loss reserve per the figures they were reporting to the US parent company for the purposes of the group consolidation. If this doesn’t sound like a big deal, I’ll add that per their own local trial balance they had positive reserves of £10m. Per the figures they were reporting to the US, they had reserves of negative £5m. It might sound strange, but the difference was perfectly legitimate, being the result of accounting entries which are allowed under (the rather slack) American accounting standards but totally unpermissable in the UK, as well as a culmination of some rather random debits and credits which had taken place in the prior period following a management buyout. The point was, I needed these debits and credits detailed so that I could make a stab at auditing them. In the prior year, the client had provided a very nice spreadsheet which made the transactions as clear as transactions which are as clear as mud can possibly be. This year, the new accountant informed me that such a spreadsheet didn’t exist and she wasn’t going to prepare one for me.

The solution might have been to go over her head and talk to her boss, the financial controller. This is indeed precisely what I would have done, were it not for the fact that the financial controller happened to be in Illinois. I hasten to add that this was not a holiday but a working visit to group headquarters, nevertheless it was an exceptionally inconvenient circumstance in terms of the UK audit, and we had already made a complaint about it to Group. In his absence, I had spent a not inconsiderable amount of time attempting to reconcile the reserves myself. Actually, I had managed it, in so far as I had figured out what adjustments had been made to get from figure one to figure two. Why those adjustments had been made or whether they were correct was more than I was able to deduce unaided however, and so I had come to a rather frustrated full stop. I reported this to my supervisor, who went up to take the client to task about it.

And what happened? The minute the supervisor spoke to her about it, the client said “Oh the reserves reconciliation? Yes we’ve got one of those, it’s in the year end file with all the other audit information!”. And lo and behold, my supervisor came downstairs with a copy of the reconciliation I had wasted my evenings reperforming from scratch, as well as an entire file of wholly useful information which the client had declined to tell me existed. I was so angry, I nearly burst into tears on the spot. I mean, apart from the fact that I had wasted so much time, this made me look rather bad and let’s just say my supervisor was far from sympathetic. I protested that not only had I explained to this woman until I was blue in the face that I needed the reserves reconciliation and showed her a copy of last years in case she wasn’t quite sure what it was, I had actually sat next to her for hours whilst she attempted to help me perform it. She was perfectly well aware of the work I was doing, and seemingly also perfectly well aware that it had already been done by someone else and was sitting completed in the folder behind her desk. Unbelievable :cry:

It looked so much like I had just been inadequate at explaining what I wanted from her that I was pretty much in despair that night. The supervisor said to expect a bollocking from the manager if she found out how much time had been wasted and gave me a look like I was stupid. I was very, very fed up and thinking I might have to give up interaction with the real world and become a hermit, because I was obviously more inadequate than I thought.

You know what though? It really wasn’t my fault. I finally became certain of that a couple of days later when my colleague, who no one could possibly accuse of having a communication problem, had a pretty much identical issue. She had wasted in excess of a day of her time trying to reperform some foreign currency translations which the client had put through their books to revalue certain assets at the year end, and she was totally unable to understand why she was getting a massive difference between what she thought the adjustment should be and the adjustment which had actually been made. Again, she had spent hours talking to the main client accountant woman about this issue, and in the end I felt sorry for her and went upstairs to see if I could get to the bottom of it myself. It just so happened that when I went upstairs, the obnoxious financial accountant had gone to make a cup of tea, so I ended up talking to the very friendly sales ledger clerk instead. I casually mentioned to her what the problem was, she took one look at the exchange rates my colleague had been using in the calculation, and informed me that they were the wrong ones. Let me hasten to add that these exchange rates had been provided by the evil accountant lady, after my colleague had explained quite clearly which exchange rates it was that she needed (the client uses slightly different rates at different times for different transactions). I was rather annoyed about this misinformation, and when the accountant reappeared I went over to tackle her about it. I explained to her the details of what had happened, she gave me a sarcastic sort of look and said, “Oh dear, I seem to have led you up the garden path again!” in a most unpleasant tone of voice. I couldn’t think of anything to do expect walk away. When I went back downstairs and explained to my colleague that she’d been using the wrong rates, she then actually did burst into tears because she thought no one would believe her that she’d asked for the right ones..

Aaaarggh. The result of all this was that we had to get up at six and get to the client before eight, work until sevenish when they lock up, head back to the hotel for a quick meal and then go to our rooms and work again. That would have made for a stressful enough time, but things got worse. Oh yes, by week two we were in possession of the assistant from hell!

I don’t even know where to start with describing this assistant. He’s the worst sort of geek. Someone who has a certain amount of intelligence undoubtedly,but who has become accustomed to being told he has a lot more intelligence than everybody else, and therefore believes it. He had a scholarship at a very posh private school, and some of the work he did on his degree course means that he is exempt from sitting certain professional examinations which the rest of us have had to take. This all combines to make him feel like he is the bee’s knees, and let’s just say he’s not someone who is shy at expressing that to other people.

I’ve never had an issue with anybody else on an audit when I’ve asked them to do something and they’ve refused because they thought they knew better than me what should be done. This is a guy who utterly refused to take direction or to believe that anybody else’s opinion could possibly be more valid than his. At the start of each day I offered to run through with him exactly what work I wanted him to perform and how he should go about achieving it, and he always knocked me back. A couple of times I forced the issue and made him listen to what I had to say, but it didn’t appear to have a noticeable impact so eventually I gave up. If my colleague told him to do something, he would wait for her to leave the room, then ask me the same question to see whether I’d give the same answer or whether I’d decide he didn’t have to do it after all. He was also rather rude in his manner to my colleague, who came to the profession straight from school so clearly isn’t entitled to an opinion on anything at all, and when we came to review his work… My God! I can safely say I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. Having obviously been allocated the most straight-forward and low risk part of the audit testing to perform, he had nevertheless managed to create one of the most complicated spreadsheets in the history of the known universe, so unnecessarily complicated that not only could I not understand it, neither could the supervisor, the manager, the audit partner, or the member of client staff who had provided him with the information.

After a week in which he not only wasted his own time and my time, but insulted the other team member, caused a scene in the hotel reception, and nearly killed us by adjusting his satnav by driving, we were fortunately able to spend the third week without him, on the grounds that he was causing more detriment than good. I spent a couple of hours trying to get my head round what he had done, eventually sort of got there, concluded it was completely wrong, so deleted it and started again from scratch. Meanwhile we struggled to compose an appraisal which was sufficiently harsh, whilst still being fair. Constructive criticism is not an easy thing to get right, and I was wary of contributing too much because I will be completely honest and say I can’t stand this guy at all and I wish I never had to work with him again. I don’t know, perhaps on a normal job he wouldn’t be so bad but the constant togetherness of an away job made him unbearable. My colleague and I resorted to having a glass of wine with our evening meal to enable us to cope with the stress of dining with him. No really, I wouldn’t normally have a glass of wine when I was going back up to my room to do an evening’s work, but it really was necessary to unwind

Oh dear, I am moaning too much In the end the audit did get done. The manager came down to review on the Monday and was nowhere near as rude to me as I had been expected. With her permission, we came back to Birmingham on Tuesday night and worked from our own offices on Wednesday, on the grounds that the client had a day off. On Thursday we went back down, and there was so much still to be done it was unbelievable. The end of audit meeting was on Friday morning, and not only did all audit tests have to be signed off in a satisfactory manner by then, but I had to write the report summarising our findings which we would present both to the client and the US auditors. I had my first draft done by Tuesday lunchtime, but then followed the tedious rigmarole of incorporating other people’s suggestions. I sent it to the supervisor first, who seemed a little dubious as to what sort of report I was capable of producing and wanted to vet it without the manager’s knowledge before I sent it to her. She made some very valid suggestions of things I could include, for which I was grateful. It was amusing, however, when I then sent it on to the manager, how many of the things I had just been told to add in, the manager then saw fit to take out. The supervisor had asked me to add an extensive paragraph on the standard costing for example, which must have taken me a good hour to compose in a client-facing manner, only for the manager to put a single strike through the entire bulk of it, leaving only my opening sentence. The supervisor had also asked me to comment on the gross margin per product line, and the manager put a strike through that without even an explanation. She then requested I add a couple more points, which the partner in turn crossed out following her review. And so on, and so on, and so on!

By Thursday lunch time we finally had a draft which the partner was happy with, and so the manager emailed it to the client FD and FC. No sooner had she done so then she sent me an email headed “Prepare for the enslaught (sic) from upstairs!”, reminding me that during the 2006 audit the FD had disliked our commentary so much that he had actually emerged from the sanctuary of his office and come running down the stairs to object to it. I was quite perplexed that for hours nothing happened, but I didn’t go chasing them for comments because to be honest, I had quite enough work to do without processing further amendments. At half five the manager emailed me to ask what the response had been and ordered me to go and find out, because she and the audit partner had tickets to see Mamma Mia that night, hence needed to leave the office by six. I went upstairs in a state of extreme trepidation, only to be told by the FC that he thought it was a good report and he only had three minor changes to propose. Cool

Unfortunately I had not got tickets for a musical, and in fact I was staying down in Wantage by myself on Thursday night so I didn’t even have a lift to the hotel. I called a taxi at about twenty past six, and when it still hadn’t arrived by seven o clock I called again, only to be told that there were some hefty traffic jams in the town centre. By the time the taxi finally did arrive, transported me over to the Premier Inn some ten miles away and I had managed to check in and find my room, it was nearly eight o clock. Here was a dilemma for me. I had at least four hours work to do, and I knew that after midnight I would probably be too tired to do anything productive. However, I hadn’t had any dinner, and for lunch all I had had was a cheese roll. Not a very nice cheese roll I had to make a major decision: work, or food?! Anyone who knows me properly will realise that I generally care about food an awful lot more than I care about work, and should therefore be utterly shocked that I sacrificed my meal. I am still utterly shocked at my own commitment and dedication, if the truth be known Happily the hotel had a vending machine, however, and so I didn’t waste away, instead managing to sustain myself with a packet of crisps and getting pretty much all of my work done

I was very scared about the meeting the next morning but it actually went fine and no one asked me any questions I didn’t know the answer to. I was almost equally scared about the two-hour drive home in the manager’s car, but even that wasn’t as bad as it could have been. I realise it is very boring when people complain about their jobs, and I also realise that a lot of people have worse jobs than mine, so now I’ve had that rant I’m going to shut up now and talk about something else tomorrow. On the bright side, I have just had a very refreshing weekend with Babel, and I have a nice quiet week in the office to look forward to. Plus January is officially over – woohoo!!!

Tags: audit, Work

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