The challenge

One of the reasons I enjoy auditing is that it allows you to challenge perceptions. Most organizations have a story that has become reality. Management often doesn't have time to step back and review landscape changes. What may have been true in the past may no longer be true. One prime example I remember from an audit long ago was library circulation. Library book circulation was reported to be steadily increasing and seemed to support management's request for increased funding. However, when auditors reviewed the statistics we found two things. Part of the increase was due to an increased ability to renew books. So the statistics didn't reflect just new books checked out but also books that were kept longer through renewal. Also, when we looked at circulation trends by branch library, we found significant differences. Both of these findings didn't necessarily suggest that the library shouldn't receive increased funding, but did suggest that the current level of funding could be managed better. It also didn't necessarily mean that management was deceptive or inept. Auditors have more time to dig into the data and find subtleties.

Just as an aside, I was reading another blog today and was directed to the Vote Studies Workbook that looks at voting history and how congressmen and women votes are aligned with their party. One of the things you can do is sort the data by various categories. I sorted by the "Member Since" column which shows the year they came to office. The oldest is from 1955, so 53 years in office. Can that be right? It would have been cool to examine the data to see how many had been in office since 2000 or to aggregate by 10 year periods. Makes you wonder how the voting history looks based upon time in office.