The Auditor's Job, Honestly
What Compresses, and What Does Not
An honest account of what changes starts with what compresses. Reading compresses: contracts, minutes, correspondence and confirmations that consumed junior weeks can be flagged and summarised in hours. Vouching compresses, where the tool can point from a recorded amount to a supporting document and a person confirms the match. Tying populations together compresses, and so does drafting. What does not compress is everything the compression exists to serve: judging what the evidence means once it is assembled, evaluating an estimate's assumptions against what the team knows about the business, deciding that an explanation from management does not hold together, having the conversation that follows, and signing. The tool changes the cost of the first list and nothing about the second. The risk is not that judgement gets automated — it is that a firm prices as though it were, and stops paying for the hours judgement takes.
- Reading, vouching, flagging, tying and drafting compress — the work that consumed junior weeks
- Judgement, estimate evaluation, the difficult conversation and the signature do not compress
- The compression exists to serve the judgement, not to replace it
- The commercial risk: pricing as if judgement compressed too, and starving it of hours
The Junior-Work Question
The profession's judgement has always been trained by volume. A partner who can smell a wrong invoice acquired that sense across thousands of ordinary ones, vouched by hand in the years nobody enjoys. If the machine now does the vouching, the tedium goes — and so does the pattern library the tedium was quietly building. This is a real problem, and the honest position is that the profession has not solved it. It is tempting to wave at higher-value work from day one, but evaluation is a skill built on exposure, and a junior who has never handled the documents has less to evaluate with. The question compounds over time: today's partners were trained the old way, so the gap will surface a decade from now, in people promoted on experience they were never given the chance to accumulate. Naming the problem honestly is currently ahead of most published answers to it.
- Judgement was trained by volume: thousands of ordinary documents taught what a wrong one looks like
- When the machine vouches, the tedium goes and takes its pattern library with it
- Higher-value work from day one assumes evaluation skills that exposure was meant to build
- The gap is generational and will surface years from now, which is exactly why it is easy to defer
The Emerging Answers, Described as Emerging
Answers are emerging, and they should be described as emerging rather than as solutions. Some firms run deliberate practice: juniors vouch a sample the tool has already read, then compare their reading against the tool's and against a senior's, which turns the machine's coverage into training material rather than a replacement for it. Some rotate juniors through the follow-up on flagged items, which is where documents are still opened and where the strange ones concentrate. Some are redesigning training to teach evidence evaluation earlier, on the theory that the sequence can be reordered even if the volume cannot be replaced. None of this is proven at scale, and the firms experimenting with it mostly do not publish results. What can be said is what module two said about review at volume: the hours the tool frees are the hours judgement needs — if firms spend them there, the trade can be an honest one.
- Deliberate practice: juniors vouch a sample the tool has already read, then compare readings
- Rotation through flag follow-up, where documents are still opened and the oddities concentrate
- Training redesigned to teach evidence evaluation earlier in the sequence
- All emerging, none proven at scale — and the freed hours only help if they are spent on judgement
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