A Day In The Life Of An Auditor At The California State Auditor

As an auditor, you start your day with a pile of work. Even though you're a state employee, you're only required to work 40 hours a week, and every minute is accounted for. There is no downtime as an auditor, which is mentally exhausting because there are different types of days depending on where you are in your audit.

At the beginning, most of your time is spent reading legislation that created a program or agency, along with the regulations that interpret that legislation. You'll also research a city, looking at information on its current leadership, its programs, and recent issues that have been in the news. Lot of news reading is involved.

You'll be reading transcripts of city council or board minutes at the state level. You'll be listening to their meetings and watching them, all while trying to expand your understanding of what's happening. That's the very beginning of the process.

Generally, when you're in the scoping phase of the audit, which is the first phase, you will also go to the location. I traveled all across the state, going to various offices. I'd show up and get jammed into a tiny conference room. The smaller the organization, the smaller the room, and the more it was filled with boxes of stuff.

Then you'll talk to anyone, find somebody who doesn't look too busy, and start peppering them with questions to map the unknown, assuming it's within scope. For example, on my school district audit, we would show up at a school district or a county office of education. We'd ask them about something called an LCAP, the Local Control Accountability Plan.

The short of it is, it's a very long, complicated document that people had to write and populate with information about the district's programs. I would ask program managers who administered these programs, the writers of the LCAP documents, and the district leadership about their LCAPs. We even went to school sites and talked to principals who had to add information. So that was pretty interesting.

This is the beginning, just trying to wrap your mind around something gigantic and complicated. Then, if we fast forward to fieldwork, there's still a little bit of that, but then we start doing the testing, which is the bread and butter of auditing.

What that means is there's some expected outcome or requirement in law. If there's no law and it's just a program existing, you look at what's actually happening and compare the two. That is testing in a nutshell. It can be highly tedious and is extremely detail-oriented.

Everything you do has to tie back to some piece of evidence. Every piece of evidence has a relative value for its hierarchy of importance. For instance, the written law is the highest form of evidence, whereas an unwritten conversation between two people would be the lowest form. As I mentioned before, anyone can say anything. When the pen hits paper, that's when things start to mean something. So that's testing.

We go into report writing, where now we've done all our testing and we convert the outcomes into a narrative. Usually, if the state auditor is involved, the program is underperforming to begin with. So there will be tests that fail, where an agency isn't doing something they're required to do by law, or their program is spending a ton of money with no demonstrable effect.

We write about it in powerful words. You can go to auditor.ca.gov to look at any audit report we've put out. Then there's something called risk review, where managers at the auditor's office will review everything you write. Everything you write is tied to all the evidence you've collected.

If managers feel you haven't adequately supported a certain aspect, they will tell you to get better evidence or they will exit from the report. So everything you write has a link to the highest possible evidence for that thing. Anytime you rely on someone's attestation, whether written or spoken, you'll see in a report, "according to so-and-so" or "according to the title," to show it's an attestation.

In a sense, an auditor's report, and this is part of Yellow Book standards, is perhaps one of the best sources of evidence for whatever it is they're talking about. In the US, that might be a bold statement, but you can take virtually everything exactly as written as true. Yes, we also have staff of lawyers who review any legal claims. That's one thing I forgot to mention.

A big skill you develop as an auditor is what it might be like to be a lawyer. I made many legal analyses, shipped them off to our lawyers, asked for review, and got responses like, "looks good." This made me question why I was getting paid half for some of that work. But that's a story you hear at law firms too. So for anybody interested in law, it could be a good start if you're not going straight to law school.