Last weekend, I had an epiphany: is audit blindness an example of change blindness? The more you zoom in, the more you lose sight of the bigger picture. That is the essence of change blindness (my recent blog).
Auditors certify that the financial statements of a company give “a true and fair view”. A company’s financial statements should reflect the state of affairs of its operations. You cannot understand – let alone audit – a company’s financial statements if you don’t understand its operations and/or its (IT) systems.
The Wirecard scandal has been bugging me for a while: its financial statements showed about 3 billion euro of fake cash balances (at obscure Asian “banks”) that equaled about 3 billion euro in fake retained earning. Essentially, the company never made any profit.
Moreover, the company started lending money from banks as of 2011 (WSJ). The combination of lending money from banks (eg, for expansion) and – simultaneously – having very high cash balances at foreign banks does not make logical sense. The cost of borrowing should always be (much) higher than cash deposit rates. Such an irrational decision should alert anyone.
How can an auditor miss this?
Well, they can. In the early 1990s, my audit team had already been checking a company’s draft financial statements for a week before I arrived. I noticed a large and unusual swing in the Work in Process balance, which my team could not explain. All audit sections looked fine; there was nothing unusual. I followed my guts and started questioning management. Several months later, management was fired after asking for a loan.
More and more, accounting (eg, GAAP, IFRS) and auditing (eg, GAAS) have moved from a principle-based approach towards a rules-based methodology. By default, anything based on principles requires observing the “bigger picture“. A rules-based approach requires zooming in on individual items in the financial statements.
The more we focus on (audit) sections or (risk) silos, the more likely we will lose perspective on the bigger picture. In fact, any specialization (eg, doctors) faces the same holistic issue. The quote below is an excellent illustration of this micro vs macro phenomenon.
“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.” A quote by John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), an “English economist, whose ideas fundamentally changed the theory and practice of macroeconomics and the economic policies of governments”.
Right to Be Wrong (2004) by Joss Stone
artist, lyrics, video, Wiki-1, Wiki-2
Note: all markings (bold, italic, underlining) by LO unless stated otherwise.
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