Statutory Audit:

 Lodha firm completed their audit yesterday for agartala asset. The dual team where details in work. They exhaustively scanned our ERP reports , many times, linewise entries, to corss check .

Many felt, since it was their last year, they could afford the critical approach.Many of my collegues commented that, had they been so sincere right from the inception(2001) accounts would have cleaned up  lot.

What striked odd, was, inability to understand nuances of the state of art ERP system FI-CO module , implemented throughout the company since 2003/4.

I was at pain , to make em , understand, implication of many program commands activated by salary section for payroll & their implication on G/L.

Payroll module hits G/L when wage type entires are made by accounts .

But, many times, all cycles are not completed in toto by payroll section users. This results in mismach between payroll report & G/L report.

This is monthly occurance esp when payuroll reports called schedules for CPF, PRBS,CSS, LIC,Income tax are run, printed on bulky voluminous printout sheets. When , i cross check with respective G/L 's their is always some difference.

But auditor from lodha, were unable to understand system implication. They held to their ground turf: reconcile G/L with trial balance!

We all had a torturous one month audit & it was for the first time at Agartala, Tripura office, to see how unrelemnting audit was to complain, demand  information.

It would have been appropiate if teh dealing officer be questioned/ audited for teh work done for the year. But, the irony, of working in public sector , is that the one who ventures his ncek out , gets trapped!

Officers (4/5) who are assigned vendor payments bill (say) , the junior most amongst them was trapped by their seniors to face the audit.The rest got scott free .

So their mantra was, even if you do point blank accounting mistakes, hide from audit, by feigning ignorance, diverting audit to hapless junior, & take boss into confidence. Junior's are qualified so they must answer auditor!!

One major objective of audit, to correct & stop, accounting errors is lost.

I tried explaning, system process & accountability, to him, but he refused to accept that, & demanded that i get the information , at any cost.

Does he not know, hierachy implications, typical public sector organisational behaviour issues (redtapism & babudom).How can a relative junior, intrude into  another  section activity(turf protection).

Neverthless, for the small, tiff, i managed to reply in satisfaction to points relating to my work assignment.