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):

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. First thing on Monday one of the junior staff asks to talk to you in private. That staff person tells you they think one of the other junior staff is talking about quitting very soon – perhaps before the end of the audit – and this would cause a major problem finishing the work. What do you do with this information?

A member of the client’s staff asks to see you in private – he tells you that he thinks one of your audit staff is paying too much attention to one of the client’s accounting personnel – they seem to be enjoying each other’s company but he thinks it is affecting the client’s productivity. What do you do with this information?

Change roles - you are now the junior person on the audit team. In meeting a client accounting supervisor, he or she mentions that they have caused some previous audit staff to get fired because they asked too many dumb questions during the audit. How do you answer this older senior client individual?

Back to the manager role - one of the staff tells you on Monday morning that over the weekend they saw one of your staff and a client accounting manager out having dinner at a very nice restaurant.   What do you do with this information?  

Answer 1