As promised, today’s auditing carol is a song in praise of our customer – the auditee.

Fill your cup with gingerbread lattes, make up a batch of your favorite holiday cookies, and join us in the glow of the computer screen as we sing another auditing carol. (Is it me, or are these getting darker?)

For today’s audit carol, a song from the Broadway hit “The Sound of Auditing” which has become an auditing carol classic.

A little something special this holiday week. For the next few days, some holiday carols. In addition, if all goes well, a special treat at the end of the week. (If you have any trouble figuring out the tunes, let me know.)

We’ve visited this topic before, but here are a few more quotes from some of the greatest internal audit movies of all time:

I won the lottery today. (No, not the big money. You think I’d be bothering with this if I’d hit a couple million dollars? Okay, maybe I might, but that’s a problem for another day.) I checked my Powerball numbers this morning and had hit three of the five numbers (with no power ball). WOW! What are the odds of that?! (Actually, they are about one chance out of 300. I looked it up.) So, with visions of money (not great amounts of money, but money nonetheless) dancing in my head, I went to the web site to learn just what kind of fantastic profit I’d made on my $20 investment. 

Reading John Dos Passos’ novel Three Soldiers, I came across two quotes that, at first, seem unrelated (in both concept and the context of the book). However, given the right twist, they speak to different aspects of the profession of internal audit and of pursuing the role of professional internal auditor. (Actually, they have relevance to anyone who is trying to achieve something, but let’s stick with the internal audit spin, shall we?) Here are the quotes: 

During a recent flight from Las Vegas, I chanced across the epitome of what, over time, I’ve started calling “the Entitled Traveler”. You know who I mean – that guy (and, I am sad to say, they are almost always guys) who has spent his entire business career on a plane. Mind you, not enough miles to get the big perks – the automatic upgrades, the free flights to anywhere he wants to go - but, enough that he gets a little something extra every once in a while and so has begun to feel that everything should go his way – or there will be hell to pay.

Gene Wolfe, science fiction writer, once said, “Genius lies not in doing something better than anyone else but in doing something no one else can do at all.” I read that as part of a book review by James Sallis on the new collection of short stories by Carol Emshwiller. There is ample evidence in the review that this collection is worth reading (not surprising if you are aware at all of Emshwiller’s work). However, what really stuck with me out of a six-page review was that single quote.