Mean accountant

This one is for all the accountants out there…

After grumbling rather petulantly at an auditor the other day, I started wondering when I started becoming so horrible to those poor little audit clerks who spend their lives ticking one number to another. I'm sure I wasn't always this mean.

I mean, I started my working life as one of them, so why is it that I now treat them with such poor regard? I’m sure that when I started out in commerce (“the other side”) I was actually kinda nice to them (to their faces anyway). Was it because I had just left the auditing profession, so a sort of kinship still existed? Or was it because I was still young and dumb? Or is it because auditors are even dumber now than they were seven years ago?

Back in the day even the worst audit clerks I worked with knew how to roll forward an equity reconciliation for a simple company. These days they can’t even do that by themselves. Admittedly the auditor in question (who was already in her second year at this big four firm) was probably an outlier in the IQ stakes, but she was very sweet and very pretty and so the powers that be had hired her, but accounting was perhaps the wrong career choice for her, bless the poor girl.

More recently, at a different company, I have had to explain the same thing to the same auditor every day for three days in a row. Granted, it was slightly more complex than merely adding up a couple of numbers, but she already had all the information, AND last year’s explanation, as it is a recurring adjustment each year. “But I explained that to you yesterday and sent you all the stuff supporting it,” I said curtly, the “so now f*** off and look at it properly before asking me stupid questions” part being left unsaid, except in tone. Obviously this was too subtle, as she doggedly kept asking me the same thing, craftily, in a different way until I sat with her and showed her which numbers to add, without her understanding the underlying concept, I suspect. Which means the same question from a different auditor next year, I presume. The life of an accountant. Sigh…