One Day of Auditor

Welcome to a day in the life of a staff auditor-a case which paints a grim picture of a young CPA's life during busy season. Brent Dorsey has spent every weekend working since busy season started, his (pregnant) wife of 11 months is frustrated that he's never home.

His work demands are unavoidable though, and on top of normal busy season pressure, his senior is up for promotion to manager and is determined to come in under budget on a job that is already solidly over budget.

The situation? Brent's senior has given him an assignment that will take all weekend, and implied that Brent should come in under budget by 35 hours on the 100-hour job. In other words, Brent needs to eat hours to make his senior happy.

Of course, the right answer is - do the work well, and don't eat hours. After reading the case though, I wondered how difficult it is to make that decision in accounting. Will refusing to eat hours decrease your chances of continuing employment at an audit firm?

I turned to the web to find some open discussions on the topic, and found some disturbing comments on articles on GoingConcern.com and StuffAccountantsLike.com. A few examples from Going Concern:

"Cripes. I've eaten so much time, I'm still picking the clock springs out from between my molars.

…

Of course, if you stop eating time, the Manager looks bad, and you get a mediocre to bad review, and get RIF'd.

I like my clocks medium-rare, thank you; it takes less time..."

"If I work 2,200 chargeable hours a year and then in the final rating get yelled at for not pusing down work and informing others about workload and being over budget, I am a standard performer. However, if I work the same, do the same quality, and only charge say 1,800 hours of that, then all of a sudden, I am an excpetional performer and get a better raise and bonus. Which do I think most of the "exceptional" performers do? Duh. Why do we do it? MONEY. And our same utilization/hours charged looks a lot better...