When the world financial world fell apart, I looked at my own profession

[AllentownJake]

I was an auditor. I have been doing auditing for 5 years with a brief stint in Compliance for a financial service firm for a year and as a SOX project manager (not exactly pure auditing). Since I started this job, there has been a movement to have auditors become "consultants" and "add value." What people to neglect to understand is my showing up in a department, pink shirt, laptop, smiling adds value as it is. I scare the fuck out of people and they tend to behave better.

Part of the new initiatives for the year was moving our work papers to an electronic format. Vendors came in to do demonstrations. The largest vendor sent a sales guy, who was a pure sales guy, he didn't have any experience or broad knowledge of the task we perform. He provided two pieces of literature for the meeting a one sheet glossy description of the product, and an 8 page pamphlet of the training they provide for the product. After taking one look at the training marketing materials, I started to play with the sales guy by asking him detailed questions. I got scolded it for it after the meeting.

The training pamphlet was the most obscene piece of literature you could have ever handed to me. Through my career, my specialty became procurement and travel and entertainment report audits.

Cover: Company Logo, Palm trees, Hotel in Orlando

1st page/back of front cover: Picture of company founders (masturbation by company founders no one gives a fuck about you)

2nd page: Picture of former Olympic skier Speaker giving motivation speech at one of last years training seminar. Upon search, skier has two life accomplishments, Gold medal and motivational speaker. Power of you new age bullshit nonsense, to be spoken to a group of people whose job is supposed to be to assume the worst of human nature.

3rd page: Bob Marley "A tribute to Freedom", (I shit you not a make believe cape-town with Reggae singers for upper middle class yuppies to dance at. I wonder if in the afterlife if Bob Marley spits or laughs.)

4th page: Golf Course (of course)

5th page: Waterpark (nothing says fun than a whole bunch of angry auditors in innertubes)

6th page: List of local attractions (Gotta eat)

7th page: Training overview in brief (What this wasn't a getaway for my mistress and myself?)

8th page: Training Schedule and reservation information (You get a discounted rate the first year you buy the product)

Now, if I found this in a purchasing director, IT guy, or HR person's office I wouldn't be surprised and I hope they would have the common sense to hide it from me when I came to evaluate their decision making process for anything IT solution they bought, because if I found it, the bid process part of the audit, which is generally pretty extensive would become the akin to corporate waterboarding. To see a company marketing auditing software handing this shit out to auditors made me want to vomit. Because they were very successful company and had a very large client list. They were one of the top 3 major players.

Translation, people in my profession were misbehaving with company resources, and if the cops are out there acting up and not holding themselves to the standards they are supposed to enforce on others, you are fucked. Oh and management didn't see why I was so offended with the literature and seeing how big of a client list, I have a feeling a lot of audit management out there didn't see my point. I extrapolate this to good hard working people looking at their 401(k) balances and them being 40% of what they were at one time.

I loved my job, I really loved the profession, I hate what it devolved into. So that and about 20 other reasons is why I'm happy to be making a career change albeit mine was forced for trying to make a few points on what are responsibilities were to management, and friends think I'm nuts for not wanting rum runners at the Bob Marley experience.

[Starry Messenger]

1. An excellent decision.

Drinking rum runners at the Bob Marley experience sounds like a level of purgatory.

These junkets were training for software?

[AllentownJake]

2. Yes, auditing software

Which is what made it even more offensive, auditors are supposed to be looking for other people doing this bullshit in the company.

[Starry Messenger]

4. It sounds more or less like a bribe.

How were they justifying it to auditors? I assume there was some sort of creative explanation for that big of a bribe.

[AllentownJake]

7. They weren't justifying it

Here is where we hold our training, we'd love to see you. I'd really have to investigate whether they make money on the training or if they use it as a you lose strategy but you increase sales of upgrades etc.

Department heads have budgets, part of that budget is training, in fairness to my former department head, she generally tried to get the most bang for her buck.

Just the fact that the culture exists out there, that you should send your auditors to Orlando for training at a resort boggles my mind. Like I said, auditors are supposed to be the ones who monitor the behavior of an organization and optimize what is given back to shareholders. They aren't supposed to be taking training vacations to Florida.

Like I said, they were one of the top 3 major players in this particular market with lots of big clients, and I'm pretty sure that pamphlet wasn't just printed for my company.

[Starry Messenger]

12. It boggles my mind too.

I was morbidly curious to see if they couched it in some kind of soft-sell corporate euphemism. It sounds like the kind of brochure they put out for selling time-shares.

(Purely off-topic, but if you've never read the Travis McGee novels by John MacDonald, I think you would enjoy them. Your OP was a bit reminiscent of his writing. They are set in Florida and he explores a lot of the corruption of corporate culture in the 1960s among other various things.)

[AllentownJake]

13. I'll have to check it out

It isn't really a new thing. They were handing this out in June of 2009. Translation, we believe no one has any intention of changing their behavior and that is when, I started to become very critical of the President.

[Stephanie]

35. I once gave a set of those novels as a wedding present.

I honestly can't tell you what I was thinking, but at the time it seemed like an excellent gift! To the happy couple, maybe not so much.

[Starry Messenger]

37. That's a great present!

I got my fiance into them and we treasure them. We were sad when we finally finished the series. I reread them during late winter doldrums.

[Stephanie]

36. dupe

hiccup

[johnaries]

3. Yep, that one vendor you talked about is definitely trying to hide

something. Like maybe that their product sucks. I bet their support sucks, too. And your management are probably idiots for not recognizing it.

Good on you for getting out of there, and good luck in whatever you do in the future.

[AllentownJake]

16. Who knows?

They might honestly have the best software for the purpose known to man, they shouldn't be handing out vacation offers while they market it to people who are supposed to be watching out for the shareholders.

[Nikki Stone1]

5. "a whole bunch of angry auditors in innertubes" ROFL!!!!

OMG, I laughed so hard!

But it's amazing how marketing and sales trump common sense decision making. Lots of bad product is sold with crap like that.

[AllentownJake]

11. Yes and when it is handed to the people who are supposed to be the cops in corporate America

The cops are either dumb, or what to get their groove on to some reggae.

[Nikki Stone1]

17. It's like no one wants to be the adult and take responsibility

They just want to look at pretty pictures and hear "positive thinking" and "the Secret".

Auditing is kind of a dour profession in some ways: you are assuming that people will break the rules and that even unintentional waste will always exist. And it's necessary to have that mindset. But it seems like businesses are just avoiding uncomfortable truths.

[Odin2005]

27. Sounds like some idiots at the job placement company for the disabled I work through.

Talk all strict, but the ass-kissing job coaches still get away with wearing flip-flops and treating clients and other job coaches like crap. And this is AFTER they got new management and supposedly cleaned house and, get this, have weekly "team-building" sessions which are just essentially typical corporate BS.

[AllentownJake]

28. Team building sessions are the biggest bunch of idiocy in corporate America

I only like them when they involve paint ball, cause I like that anyway.

[Odin2005]

32. Yay for paintball!

:rofl:

[BeFree]

6. Idea for job

...find a way, anyway, to audit electronic voting machines, the DREs.
Betcha a star ya can't.

[AllentownJake]

8. I can reverse egineer something

and you probably are right, someone with more experience than I have, designed the trail on those things, purposely vague.

[Digit]

9. It's unfortunate that others don't see the issue

There is still a need for ethical auditors, so maybe just a change of organizations is required.

Or is it really that bad all over?

[AllentownJake]

10. Ethical organizations can become nightmares overnight

All it takes is one of three things to happen

1) Change of top management, which is less ethical than previous management. CEOs come and go pretty fast these days, and they tend to bring on people with their worldviews.

2) A very good few quarters followed by return to normal business. Pressure is put to get back to those good quarters even if they were the result of a market force that cannot be logically maintained and rules of behavior become looser.

3) A few really bad quarters with pressures to produce results.

[David Zephyr]

14. I walked away from my executive position with a fortune 500 company in 1994.

They were promoting me to run three large (300,000 sq. ft each) factories in the Deep South that I was really to be shutting down to move it all to Shenzhen in China. They had the realtors waiting to find me a big house on the water so I wouldn't miss California "too much" and paraded me around each of the three towns to meet the mayors, the chambers...all the shit. This kabuki dance went on for nine months before I told them I wasn't moving from Los Angeles and turned down their promotion.

It was like the weight of the world lifted from off my shoulders. I began my own little start up followed by another and well, it had a happy ending.

What began as a thrill to me in my twenties and thirties became toxic as the 1980's and the Yuppies and Bonfire of the Vanities mentality took hold. Reagan was king and I was at the party as the token leftie and gay guy, but I was dying inside.

Working today in a large corporation is, unless you are on the board, a life filled with treachery and insecurity. Soylent Green is here.

[AllentownJake]

15. You can go from a top rating to fired in 30 days

and your behavior might not have changed at all in those 30 days in the current corporate world, an ethical decision, could be the simple cause.

[Odin2005]

31. That's why I would never do well in the business world..

I'm a stickler for rules and proper, ethical behavior and tend to chew people out that act wrongly. Which is one of the reasons I have trouble holding a job.

[AllentownJake]

18. Kick for the morning folks.

[rug]

19. Pink shirt? Doesn't sound like my auditor.

[AllentownJake]

20. I started the Pink Shirt idea my second year

It puts peoples guard down, and they tell me more. Generally I wear pastels, purple, pink, light blues, etc. You walk into a place looking like a cop, they close up immediately. There is a little psychological game, you walk in with a set program and when management starts talking you can find 2-3 more things to take a peripheral look at to add on.

[LWolf]

21. So...

what will you be doing now?

[AllentownJake]

22. Working on that

Hopefully I'll have some good news in January or February.

[LWolf]

29. I hope you have some good news, too. nt

[mascarax]

23. Thanks for sharing - wonder who likes waterparks!

It's getting worse, isn't it? Including salespeople who come in armed with glossy sheets and no clue about what their product is and (even worse) why someone would buy or (perish the thought!) NEED it. Like the 8 page brochure with really only 1 page dedicated to what they're selling (if only "in brief"). What a waste of money - says a lot about that company.

I work with a lot of different vendors. Corporations are getting worse (big to small). They don't understand what their customers do at all (surprise! customers don't really care about your founders or "executive team", including if you're a 6 person company with 4 "executives"). And they also often aren't clear on what they're selling or why.

I'd like to believe Bob Marley would laugh...but spitting is acceptable too.

Good luck to you, AllentownJake. The pink shirt was a nice touch in an auditing position.

[AllentownJake]

25. Yes the lack of knowledge in sales people is amazing these days

The best vendor reps I've ever dealt with were people who had worked in the industry in some capacity and kept a notebook of client issues and how they were resolved using their product. The reps were also excellent repositories about making their products work.

The problem is the business culture. Sound knowledge in a lot of organizations have been replaced with talking points and happy go lucky spin. We are really becoming a society of no substance.

Spiratually, economically, and governance wise.

My biggest problem with the administration is that I thought Barack got it, but I see him engaging in the same empty games of the past 30 years.

[Hannah Bell]

34. "no substance" - i think it's so, & i started noticing the change in the 80s.

my job, e.g., though it requires minimum BA + some advanced work & I have MS - could mostly be done by someone with a 6-mo training, because 90% of it is, in practice, done by rubric handed down from national level "experts".

Taking the advanced study seriously is the path to frustration, since the advanced knowledge makes you question the rubric. But happy talk, we're "professionals," etc. Go along to get along.

I'd rather clean houses for a living, actually.

[Odin2005]

24. "I scare the fuck out of people and they tend to behave better" LOL, great post Jake!

[AllentownJake]

26. Thanks

Sometimes middle and upper management need a smiling asshole in a pink shirt to remind them they are employees as well.

[grantcart]

30. I went through a similar experience

was a partner in a nationwide managment consulting company (but they never diversified into auditing).

You strike me as a person who would be a fantastic teacher if those options were available.

One of the biggest changes in America is that we have always been a country of proprietorships, drug stores, markets, etc. And those have all been wiped out by chains and not just Walmart. Of course for a couple hundred years most people in America simply owned their own farm.

Having been an auditor you have excellent experience to help small businesses as a consultant but the problem is getting a constant stream of clients after the initial 5-6 low hanging fruit. If you can diagnose a persistent problem and reverse engineer it then you could market the solution to that problem.

Good luck in everything you do.

[dave29]

33. I think you would have enjoyed the letter I wrote to management

at a major telecommunications company I worked for for nine years. This after being "retained" to help script software support for folks in India who do not have much background working with red-state type field technicians... all the while knowing they could not let me go without keeping me on for the transition (I was the only guy left in my group).

It was a manifesto about how outsourcing the security of the entire fiber-optic network was not such a hot idea at all.

Strangely I was proven right within 3 months of my departure. Alack.