Concurrent Audit

The text book definition of Concurrent Audit would read something like this, “Concurrent audit is a systematic and timely examination of financial transaction on a regular basis to ensure accuracy, authenticity, compliance with procedures and guidelines.” To a layman this means nothing, moreover it oversimplifies things and alienates people from this and other related concepts.

Many people take such oversimplified definitions as an excuse to disrespect and belittle a concurrent auditor’s role in modern day business. In fact concurrent audit deals with substantial checking of transactions and not test checking. It is a lot of hard work and at the end of the day proves to be more effective and valuable for organizations then period end and annual audits.

The concept of concurrent audit has been introduced to reduce the time gap between occurrences of transaction and it’s overview or checking. At the end of the day businesses would suffer if there are no daily checks on their transactions. Other forms of audit, important as they are, turn out to be only postmortem of transactions and nothing more. Concurrent audit serves the purpose of effective control as it is normally conducted by external agencies like chartered accountants firms. The entity’s staff moreover becomes more proficient in the process as they want to avoid any complaints from concurrent auditors.

In my three and a half years as an article under a Chartered accountant I have been on many concurrent audits and was appalled on seeing people’s attitude regarding concurrent audit. It is unrealistic to expect them to check every single thing and obviously they come up with their system to avoid over load of paper work, it’s important to remember that they work with the staff not against them. Defensive attitude ends up making the work all the more tedious. In my view concurrent auditor are here to help so, help them help you.