Participating in auditor training

As stake financial clerk typically I go to audit review meetings and help answer questions about what an auditor might have seen during an audit, then being assigned to follow-up on some of the specific exceptions. This year I have been invited to speak and provide some training during the kick off meeting for the year end audits. I am NOT a member of the audit committee and I will point out that the official church audit instructions along with specific instructions from the committee trump what I have to say but given this opportunity, I wonder what I should tell auditors before they start the cycle. Any input?

A couple of things that come to mind. Not from my experience, but reading the messages on the forum.

One, things are likely to be messier then they're used to. It's been a very trying year for the Financial clerks. Between the CUBS conversion and other changes, there has been a lot of confusion resulting in transfers to clean things up. Only to have some of those transfers create other problems. Like when the church shifted from a transaction date to a posting date. For example, some transfers intended to clean up last year's problems suddenly were transferred into this year's transactions. What seemed to be a good idea at the time suddenly turned into a not-so-good idea.

Bottom line, they may want to ignore what appears to be sloppy work and concentrate on the policies. Next year should be better.

Secondly, the church now places a interest amount in the Other/AMFA. As such, they may expect to see some small change where they might otherwise expect to see a zero amount.

From the audit form, your responsibilities are:

Before the audit:

• Read this entire document to make sure you understand the auditing process. Contact a member of the stake audit committee if you have any questions.
• Coordinate the training of ward clerks in financial record keeping, policies, and procedures.

After audit forms are returned:

• Meet with the audit committee to review any problems recorded in Part 3: Corrective Action Plans Work Sheet.
• Be sure the ward clerks for finances receive training on how to avoid and correct problems found during the audit.

So your specific role is training financial clerks, both before and after the audit. Before the audit, that training assignment is very broad -- basically, you make sure that financial clerks know everything they need to know about their calling. After the audit, your training responsibility focuses on issues found in the audit, basically making sure that financial clerks gain understanding in those areas so that those specific problems don't occur again.


When I participate in these audit meetings (and my stake's audit committee always invites me to present whatever I think is appropriate in these meetings), I do two things:

• Ask the auditors to pay special attention to any issue where it looks like the ward financial clerk needs additional training. Certainly any audit exception would fit in this category, but I also ask them to let me know about areas where I could help provide training, even if it doesn't result in an actual exception.
• Discuss issues I have seen during the last 6 months as I have been supporting the financial clerks so that they can be aware of them. RussellHltn noted two good topics along this line in his post. Although auditors may have been financial clerks in the past, not all have, and even those that have probably are not aware of many of the details of what's been happening with CUBS, and the auditors certainly can't learn that from the audit forms. The stake financial clerk can help them understand these issues.

Also, my stake audit committee chairman is very careful to make sure I know everything that the assistant area auditor has communicated to our stake. I can help clarify such topics. For example, our assistant area auditor told us not to mark interest accumulated in AMFA as an exception; I can help our stake auditors understand how that interest accrues and what it will look like on the Analysis and Reconciliation of “Other” Category section of the audit form.

Thanks for the tips. As I am putting together some notes, I reviewed the auditor training online. There are a couple of questions I know I will get. First when is the training going to be updated, it still discusses the reconcilliation reports and how to check them. I also anticipate getting questions, from both auditors and clerks, about transmission reports. They are not referred to at all in the audit instructions. We will be doing our annual clerks bonfire this month to give the clerks an opportunity to destroy records outside the renention period. I fully expect them to ask me why they are taking up valuable file cabnet space retaining these things.