Auditor interview - written assessment?

[Katlow]

I currently work in finance, but I have an interview for an auditing role coming up soon.
In the interview invite it mentions there being a written assessment on auditing.
Has anyone done similar? What kind of thing should I be prepping for? I have zero experience in auditing and I think they're aware of this as it's not on my CV at all but I would love to blow them away.

Internal or external audit? What size firm?

Apologies! It's a local council, internal auditing.

Have a quick read on Acowtancy under the AA topic. Its exam text for the audit exam but it's really easy to read and not too technical.

I've not had a lot of experience in that area, but it could be looking for risks in a situation (lack of control over cash expenditure, for example) or could be drafting a report so that a non-auditor would understand the issues that are being reported, or drafting recommendations to store the systems and controls.

Sorry, "store" should be "improve"

Chartered internal auditor here! When we interview graduates we present them with a list of findings and ask them to identify the risks and potential recommendations or actions to mitigate the risk. And maybe to add a RAG to them to assess which takes priority for implementation. Hope that helps.

If it does end up being something like recommendations / identify8 g risks, just think

• what could go wrong by mistake
• what could someone deliberately do to steal cash or items from them (doesn't need to be directly - could they have items delivered to them, receive refunds personally, get receipts from customers)
• what are the biggest risks (highest value individually or cumulatively if it can be repeated, risk of bad publicity, etc)
• what could be done to avoid it? automation reduced risk of fraud, but could increase risk of error, additional checks might address both but are time consuming, for example

I don’t work in a finance function but I would be thinking about things like…

• risk assessment methodology - do you know what methods they use, is it in the job ad?
• methods of auditing - selecting samples, right sample size, making sure checks are robust etc.
• controls - what makes a strong control. preventative vs detective, automated vs manual etc
• quantifying issues and assessing materiality (how big of a deal are any issues you find)
• actions - working with stakeholders to get buy in, agreeing robust actions to fix issues in reasonable timescales
• report writing and presentation skills possibly?

Does the job ad give any clues?

I agree. A quick summary of Audits, and mitigating potential risks.

I don't know if the attached is too complicated but I was discussing the Audit exam paper with ds1. This is the answers and covers a lot of the principals.

Audit