How Important Is Presentation in an Audit?

During the course of the audit process, there's so much time that's involved in going through and trying to minimize liability. You're going through and hopefully actively controlling the scope of the documents. You're controlling the scope of the information that's being presented and so when you get to the point where you're giving a final presentation or giving a preliminary presentation to an auditor, how that information is presented is critically important. I can't tell you how many compliments that we've gotten based on the way that we prepare materials and the ease of those materials for the people that we're dealing with. I mean look at this. Man if you were having an audit client and somebody comes in with a nice organized well presented binder and you're able to sit across from that person during the course of an audit meeting, having a casual conversation with you, you're flipping through the tabs as I'm talking to you, it just makes things easy. You're in a good mood and you go back and do your audit report, you've got something easy to reference. It just helps. Consequently if I bring you a box of stuff and it's not organized and you have to dig through it and you can't find things and you can't refer to things and pages are missing or whatever, you're going to get frustrated. So you want to present materials in a way that tells a story. All of the stuff tells the story. We're going to walk through a sequence. You want your materials to line up to that sequence, so the presentation portion is extremely critical. It can save you a ton of money and it's very valuable to make sure that your presentation is right going into an audit.

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Sam Brotman, JD, LLM, MBA

Owner and Director of Legal
Brotman Law

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