The management of a team of auditors involves knowledge of professional standard
ID: 2586233 • Letter: T
Question
The management of a team of auditors involves knowledge of professional standards and leadership of the individuals on the team. Stress and unexpected developments are not unusual events during an audit. The team leaders have to be prepared to react and make decisions that perhaps they have never experienced before.
Please describe what you think are appropriate actions if you were the audit team leader as a manager, and you had the following issues arise on the audit (treat them as individual, unrelated items):
1) Your deadline to finish the audit is in two weeks, and you have five staff working to finish the audit at the client’s office. On Monday morning one of your staff members does not show up at the client and is not responding to calls or text messages. What do you do?
2) A junior member of the audit team asks to see you in private – he tells you that one of the other staff auditors is spending a lot of time on social media during the work day – seems very distracted. What do you do?
3) The timing of this audit is very near the annual personnel review cycle for your firm’s professional staff. Of your audit team members, you know that one is likely to be asked to leave the firm due to substandard performance, but that will not happen until some weeks after the audit is complete. That person makes a casual comment in the audit conference room about buying a house soon – the staff person and their spouse are looking forward to the career with the firm. What do you do?
Explanation / Answer
1. Send the four remaining staff members to the clients office thereby assigning the scope of work to be performed by that absent staff to among the remaining staff who can have thorough knowledge about the area of work assigned to the absent staff.
2. After knowing the compliant from the junior member of the audit team about the other staff who is spending a lot of time on social media, ask the areas of work audited during the particular day and seek the explanation from such auditor staff. As improper explanation or poor results will be noticed so assign the areas audited by such members on a day and ask working papers done on it.
3. As performance of the members will be reviewed ,every member shall take care of the work assigned in reasonable period. In this case since a member makes a casual comment in the audit conference room about buying a house , as a team leader prompt him to discuss his personal matters after his office hours. So that one should restore his work normaly.
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