How CAs are like doctors, archaeologists and other professionals.

A practicing CA and a visiting Prof to my college Prof FCA Gokhale sparked off this thinking with his repeated analogies comparing the medical and CA professions.  That got me thinking to other analogies, and this post was born.

·         CAs and doctors:- A good doctor reads the patients symptoms(indicators) and tacitly elicits information(like management representations!).

·         CAs and archeologists:- Given that a statutory financial audit is on transactions which happened in the past, the CA does not have a time machine to go back and check that everything was done 100% in order. That is why the assurance is ‘reasonable’ not ‘absolute’, and hence the need to triangulate evidence as good archeologists do(carbon dating, historical records, land patterns..)

·          CAs and lawyers:- Despite the abundance of lawyer jokes out there, good lawyers DO exist, and they tell it to the client as it is-merits/demerits of case, chance of winning and cost-benefit analysis. Also, they generally operate on fixed fee irrespective of case outcome. That is what CAs are supposed to do in most litigation support and advisory assignments.

·         CAs and statisticians- Statistics is all about presenting data in its most relevant and useful form. And that is what adds value to plain numbers. After all, any MIS/report is ultimately numbers sliced and diced in a context. And beyond descriptive statistics, the huge data volume and resultant sampling requirement is making CAs master the nitty gritties of statistical sampling, test of hypothesis and other inferential statistics. Ultimately, all audit standards are a fine balance between Type I and Type II error

·         CAs and detectives:- Detectives(as those detective novels/CID/films would have told us) excel in finding patterns and looking for the unexpected. In case of audits, the obvious thing is the final entries/vouchers. But the invisible stuff(non J/V adjustments, cost allocation spreadsheets, computations & recomputations, reconciliations) is often more valuable, as is peer analysis.

·         CAs and historians:- Like many other things in life, financial statements audit is a path dependent process. As generations have discovered(and will doubtless discover in future), those who forget the past are bound to repeat its mistakes. Therefore, the auditor’s permanent file provides some continuity to the audit to record the cumulative learnings/client insights.