Curious, this seems like a good place to deploy AI tooling. If I’m involved in internal controls, I’ll know what the auditors look for.
If an AI can augment the auditors to find more suspicious transactions such as to companies with no employees, or conflicts of interest - I could probably find more fraud.
Ex-IT Auditor and I agree. I was screaming for automation in the audit process for years and nobody would listen. Many of the employees are burnt-out and hate their jobs. My prediction is that governments will decide to audit companies using some kind of AI and report back any findings to shareholders, while ensuring correct taxes are paid. Big 4 has 5 years max to pivot their business or they're going to die.
> Ex-IT Auditor and I agree. I was screaming for automation in the audit process for years and nobody would listen.
Honestly, this seems like a lose-lose for decision makers:
- automation reduces billable hours, a net loss to the auditor
- automation finds more fraud, a net loss to the person who hired the good auditor
Of course, shareholders would appreciate less fraud, but have no seat at this particular table.
I’m very excited to see how technology impacts financial reporting in the future. We’re rapidly approaching a point where every single transaction could be audited in real time with software, and the details of each transaction automatically scrutinized.
"Excited" is one way of putting it. If we had any chance of this working or ending well, we wouldn't get daily or weekly posts here on HN of people having their Stripe/AWS/PayPal/Google accounts banned. Look forward to "Your company has been locked, please contact your auditor AI to get no help whatsoever"...
But that's the exact opposite to the economics of consulting esp at these big companies. The goal is to get as many low cost employees doing the most amount of high bill work as possible to make the most profit. Automation or ai would just lower what you can charge by removing 1000 hours per year of a college grad making 50-90k while charging at 500k a year for them. And you need these rates to cover for the highly paid sales leads and project leads as well as profits. You'd have no good way to pay your high bill rate applied scientist.
But why does cost not matter on the contract? A few reasons, one being is these are hourly contracts and the consultants know the customer has to finish the project. there will be more money. Second the customers are picking one of these companies on rep. If they fire the consultants they just rotate through the rest of the big five. There's no real incentive for the big five to change their model with customers who are making decisions based on who sponsors the golfer they like. Just like how every VC used svb, go with who you know.
This is why I left consulting. Every good shop gets wooed by the siren song of butts in seats economics. After consulting I've moved to where I sonetimes have to damage control projects from the big 5 and other high end large tech consultants on code. They're all doing the same thing if they get that big.
We had 2 recently with nationally renowned consultants where the provided heads couldn't use basic shell scripts or basic cloud cli, all at a senior DevOps bill rate. I ended up interviewing several of them and the only one of them id trust was their senior principal architect (5% time) who I'd put as a Jr/sr sysde/sde at our co. We fired the consultants. Luckily we only wasted money, our pm, and a few hours of my time.
Beware any company that competes with beer and insurance companies for commercial slots.
If an AI can augment the auditors to find more suspicious transactions such as to companies with no employees, or conflicts of interest - I could probably find more fraud.