Judie - An Internal Auditor's One Day in Korea

Introduction: Most of the people do not understand the job of Internal Auditing ("IA") and dislike internal auditors--a very sad thing to me!   To make things simpler, here is one typical day of my IA assignment in Korea.

Date: 19 March

Weather: Freezing and Windy (strange!! It's spring, but feel like winter.)

**The day started at 9:00 am 

I rushed to PCA LIFE building so as to keep my good reputation of punctuality and to escape from the outside strong wind.

**9:00-10:00 am

Checking email and arranging meetings with auditees from 3 different departments. Since it's the first week of field work, my task is to understand the key controls in the relevant departments, so as to complete the audit programmes assigned to me and to start filing the process narrative workpaper and assessing if there're any problems in process design.

Luckily, I got three meetings confirmed at 11:00, 14:00 and 15:00.

**10:00 to 11:00 am

Reading the documents collected during planning stage; preparing the questions to be asked during the meeting; checking the workpapers of previous audit assignments so as to avoid overlapped areas.

**11:00 am to 12:00pm

Meeting time. I brought the translator with me, one of the difficulties in auditing the Korean entities is the language problem, and double time is required in this kind of communication as a result.

12:00 pm to 13:00 pm

...lunch time ^0^ I love traditional Korean food, and almost 80% of the Korean I learnt is related to food. What I chose was Bee Pim Bar (mixed rice&vegetables).

** 13:00pm-14:00pm

Noting down the key information collected from the morning meeting in workpapers; and preparing for the coming two meetings.

** 14:00--15:30

Since the translator was not available, I went for meeting alone...and was frustrated to find it's so difficult to communicate with the auditee. We were actually not talking about the same thing...but frankly speaking, sometimes, even by using the same mother tone, the auditees might still not be able to understand what IA want due to different working approaches. Thus there was an overrun in this meeting, and had to postpone the next meeting to 16:00.

** 15:30--16:00

Confirming the information collected from the last meeting in written email and instant messenger (that works much better...'coz many people in Korean are good in written English but can not speak fluent English).

** 16:00-16:30

The last meeting was with auditee from Finance Department. Luckily, the auditee I met was able to speak fluent English, and with my Finance background, there's no problem in our communication. I kind of recovered from the previous frustration in communication with other auditees. ^0^

**16:30--17:30

Sending the detailed document request lists to the auditees based on discussions in the meetings; documenting the key information in the workpaper; planning for the next day work.

The end of the working day! Yeah!!!

Basically, IA job requires the strong capabilities in communication, organization and time management, and softskills are particularly important during the reporting stage, when lots of negotiations/arguements will incur between the local unit management and IA team.

Although there're so many challenges in the IA job, by choosing starting from IA, I'm able to get exposures to different functions in the Prudential local units in different locations. I think it's been a great decision I've made. And no pains no gains, I'm sure all the difficulties I experience in IA assignments will help me grow faster.

One more thing, I'm proud to announce is that during this Korean trip, I develped a new skill--producing bracelet!!

The following picture shows the bracelet I designed and hand-made in a DIY store in MiunDong.