Audit/Compliance/QC/Process Improvement

What preparation do you do with your team in advance, and how do you handle auditor queries?

Normal Audit coordination

1. At Echelon I was the main point of contact with MNP for our year-end audits across six entities.  I owned the process from PBC list to audit sign-off.

2. My preparation starts well before the auditors show up. About six weeks out I go through the prior year's adjustments and findings, check that we've addressed each one, and do a self-review of our highest risk accounts. I also walk the team through which areas auditors typically focus on so nobody gets caught off guard when a query comes in. 

3. I keep a central audit folder organized by audit area with reconciliations, supporting schedules, and source documents already pulled together. By the time the request list comes in, most of it is ready to go. That's what keeps the turnaround fast. 

4. For auditor queries, I respond the same day for anything straightforward and give a committed timeline for anything more complex. If I don't know the answer right away, I say so and give an ETA. I never leave a query open. I also keep a log of every query and its status so nothing gets missed. 

5. At Echelon, that approach led to clean audits with no material adjustments year after year. We built a good enough relationship with MNP that they would flag potential risk areas before they became issues, which helped us improve our own process over time.

Can you tell me about a difficult audit or a compliance issue that you spot and how did you handle that issue?  80% Audit Issue

1. One that stands out was our year end audit at Ventum with Grant Thornton. Partway through the process, I noticed that some of our reconciliation workpapers weren't documented consistently across a few of the entities. The format had drifted from our standard, some were missing reviewer sign offs, and a few of the supporting schedules didn't clearly tie back to the GL.

2. On their own, each item looked minor. But together, they meant the audit trail wasn't as clean as it needed to be. The numbers themselves were fine. The documentation just didn't reflect the work properly. And I knew if the auditors hit those files before we fixed them, it would slow the whole audit down and raise questions about numbers that were actually correct.

3. So as soon as I saw it, I pulled the team together and we reviewed the workpapers across all six entities before the auditors got to that stage. We standardized the format, made sure every reconciliation had both a preparer and reviewer sign off, and added clear cross references between the schedules and the GL. We had it done in a couple of days.

4. When the auditors got there, everything was in order. That section moved through cleanly, no findings and no delays.

5. But the more important outcome for me was fixing the root cause. After the audit, I built a documentation standard right into the close checklist. Every reconciliation had a required format, and the sign off was mandatory before anything counted as complete. That became part of how we worked, and we didn't run into the same issue again.

Can you describe a situation where you identified a compliance gap in documentation? How did you resolve it and what did you put in place to prevent recurrence? 

1. A good example is from Echelon, when we were preparing for a CIRO regulatory review. As I was going through our files, I noticed the reconciliation documentation for two of our entities wasn't consistent. 

2. The workpapers weren't structured the same way across entities, and some were missing reviewer sign off. Nothing was wrong with the underlying numbers, but from a regulator's perspective, if it isn't documented properly, it might as well not have been done.

3. My job was to get us audit ready, but I didn't want to just patch the files for this one review. I wanted to fix the reason it happened in the first place.

4. So I did a full documentation review across all the entities, standardized the reconciliation template so every workpaper followed the same structure, and put a mandatory sign off step into the workflow so nothing could be considered complete without a reviewer's approval. Then I ran a short training session with the team so everyone understood the new standard and why it mattered.

5. We passed the CIRO review with no material findingsMore importantly, we had a repeatable process that made the subsequent audit cycle faster and cleaner.

What quality control procedures have you implemented

1. One that comes to mind is when I became Controller at Echelon. The close process had grown organically over the years, with no single standard everyone followed. Different people owned different pieces, but there was no visibility into what had been done and what hadn't, so things occasionally fell through the cracks.

2. So I built a structured close checklist. Every task had a clear owner, a preparer sign off, and a separate reviewer sign off before it counted as complete. It sounds simple, but it made a real difference. It created accountability, gave me a clear view of where we were at any point in the close, and meant nothing got missed.

3. The result was that reconciliation errors dropped off, and when the audit came around the reconciliations were already in good shape. We stopped finding issues at year end that should have been caught during the month. That checklist became our standard process, and I kept refining it each month based on what we learned.

• Another example is the AP automation project I led at Ventum. When I joined, invoice processing was completely manual. We were handling almost a thousand invoices a month, and the whole thing relied on people remembering to follow the right steps. There was no systematic way to enforce approvals or catch duplicate payments.

• So I worked with external consultants to put in an automated AP workflow that built the controls right into the process. Every invoice had to go through a defined approval chain before it could be paid, the system flagged duplicates automatically, and we had a full audit trail on every transaction.

• It took a lot of the human error risk out, freed up the team's time for other work, and gave us much better visibility into what was outstanding at any point. It was one of those changes where once it was in place, everyone wondered how we'd managed without it.

Tell me about an efficiency initiative you led in accounting operation. What was the problem, what did you implement, and what measurable improvement did you achieve?

1. When I joined Ventum, the month end close was taking 15 days. That was too slow for the consolidated reporting our lenders and CFO needed, and it put pressure on every deadline downstream.

2. My goal was to bring that cycle time down significantly across all six entities, without giving up any accuracy.

3. I tackled it in stages. First I implemented Microsoft Dynamics GP to replace the manual Excel based reporting. Once that was stable, I rebuilt the close checklist, cutting out steps that weren't adding anything and making sure everything ran in the right sequence. Then I ran the AP automation project, which moved almost a thousand invoices a month off a manual process and onto an automated one.

4. The close came down from 15 days to 8. Reporting accuracy improved, audit prep got faster, and the team had more time for actual analysis instead of data entry.