Six documents, and the order of the request tells you what the audit is really testing.
An assurance engagement opens the same way nearly every time, and the sequence of the request tells you more about what is being tested than the request itself. Nobody starts with the total. They start with the thing that decides whether the total means anything.
First the boundary note. Then one figure, chosen more or less at random, and the file it came from. If that file arrives inside an hour with a date and a name on it, the rest of the engagement is short. If it takes a week, the next question will be sharper.
Six documents, roughly, and the fourth is where most engagements come unstuck. The first three can be produced by anybody who kept their files in order; the fourth asks whether the modelled numbers were ever labelled as modelled, and that decision was taken months earlier by somebody who may no longer be in the room.
It is a sampling test disguised as a question. Nobody has time to check an entire inventory, so they check whether a single line can be traced to source quickly and cleanly, and they infer the condition of the rest from how long it took you.
I spent six years asking these questions. The uncomfortable ones are always the same eleven, and nine of them can be answered before the meeting starts.
Assembling the pack in advance does not make a weak figure strong. What it does is stop a strong figure looking weak because nobody could find the invoice behind it while four people waited.
Twenty minutes, and nobody quotes in it.
