Who audits the auditors?

An audit and advisory firm’s work helps businesses, lenders and investors decide which numbers to trust. Behind that work is another responsibility: checking the audit itself.

Today, audit teams record documents and weekly updates in an internal document management system. The firm’s quality team reviews those records against its requirements.

That review has meant reading files, comparing authorizations, signatures, approvals and billing figures, then following up when something is missing or inconsistent. A document can be present while its details conflict with another record. Finding those gaps takes careful, repeated work before the team can decide what they mean.

We built a system into the existing document workflow. Implementation connects it to the system audit teams use. The harness runs the quality checks and manages follow-ups. Inference reads the documents and compares the details across them. It flags exceptions for the quality team to investigate. The system is live, and the team makes the final call.

We’re grateful to the firm for putting its own work under this level of scrutiny. One issue found in time can protect decisions made far beyond the audit team. We hope to help make that care easier to sustain as the work grows.