To repay the faith of ppl whu visited my blog despite not having blogged for than 1/2 yr.. wahahha.. here's another juicy post to reward their unwavering support.. wahaha.. i sound like a popular author/editor.. k enuff of crap.
This post shall be entirely on the adventure of my forensic accounting and to the benefit of those who wants to know more about it and deciding whether they should go into advisory or audit side, at least for KP ppl, wahhaa.. whom i presume none should be reading this post..
For a start, it was by pure coincidence and luck that i was transferred to the forensics department. The then senior for my job is going on leave for a week and thus had no qualms whatsoever in releasing me and so i went in such a short notice since they were really in desperate need for help. That was on a thursday afternoon, just 1 day b4 our subj reg.
The man in charge of the job, happened to the 1 leading the NKF forensics team, not tt the forensics department is damn huge, only 6 in total, 1 director, 1 assoc director, 2 managers, 1 G1 n 1 G2. K i shall come to tt small incident on nkf later wahhaha..
For tt 1st 2 days (thurs n friday), the assoc director(AD) wasn't around as he was attending a certain court case. So this engagement was temporarily handled by the corporate recovery department and i was basically summarizing n documenting wat was in that 5 boxes full of paper seized from the suspected party for faciliation of easier search of documents in the future. Simply put, i dunno wat i'm doing abt and the corporate recovery department din noe wat they were on abt.
After the christmas break, tt AD came back to take over the engagement n realised basically we were wasting our time for the past 2 days summarizing the documents. The deadline was on tt friday itself and after the christmas break it was already tues. So basically it was 3 days to finish up the job with 7 or 8 boxes full of files and stuff.
Background of the case:
Client is an oil coy. client buy and sell oil. client buy oil from A and through a series of transactions, sold it to final buyer b. then b defaulted on payments totalling US 5.6m. then client discovered that A n B are actually owned by the same person. then client sued and obtained judgement against A, so here are the 7 or 8 boxes of stuff and hired the forensics ppl to rummage thru the documents for clues and stuff.
What we need to look out for:
1) Related parties transactions
2) Is there any transactions involving A n B?
3) All outstanding claims and receivables
4) All stuff related to tt person whu owned A n B
K tt was basically wat i was doing for the next 3 or 4 days. The AD chinese quite cannot make it, wahhaha.. so i sort of translated all the letters for him although i'm not very certain tt i'm 100% korrect.
So we managed to complete the nicely done report in 3 days and quite glad to be able to contribute towards it, both me and the other MI. Supposed to return to audit the following week, but he wanted to extend our stay to work on another case, wouldn't touch much on it le or else would be damn long winded..
K my thoughts on both forensics and audit:
In audit, wat i felt abt it at lower level it juz like another adminstration job. Just following thru the motion, follow last yr paper and juz need to change the nos. Sometimes could be quite brainless. Until u progress higher lvl up when u do the planning then u could see the bigger picture, but again, how many can tahan tt long until tt lvl? And it can become quite monotonous after a while, which perhaps ppl say y we auditors have no life, wahhaaha. Audit also has a much tighter budget than advisory, esp non-FIs side. which means for example, for 100 hrs of OT u work, perhaps u could only recover 50 hrs of that. And yes, audit you are only required to do sampling, at least for bigger clients and definitely not as thorough and at times u face alot of difficulties and obstacles getting info from ur client. Ah yes, audit you have peaks n non peaks.. k.. read on..
In forensics, everyting is exactly opposite. It is all very detailed and thorough look through, cos some of the evidence or "tings" can juz be hidden in very normal documents like emails and stuff.. very mind and eye taxing mind-you.. And unless u discover someting, it can become quite demoralizing and tiring after a short while. Yeah, but once u make certain progress and stuff, it spurs you on to discover new things. Undiscovered excitement, that's wat i will call it. And due to the very nature, on a case by case basis, you do not have wat "last yr paper" "last yr audit file to refer to".. or wat 10 yr series as u call it.. wahhaha.. hence there's no standard "working paper" to rely on. Everything is quite flexible. And yes, forensics or rather advisory i think in general, has quite unlimited budget. My AD ask me to "anyhow charge", k lor, then i anyhow charge le wahhaha.. cos at the start i was rather apprehensive if i can claim back everything.. he din even look at my timesheet n sign, which in the end i sort of overclaimed a little by mistake.. ok.. in here, there's oso no such thing as peak n non peak. As long as u have engagement, u are considered peak, which was y they suddenly pulled 2 MIs over to help them..
K.. this is a rather long post.. dunno if u hv fell asleep by now. haa.. but hope to be useful to ppl going to other big 4 to try out advisory side if possible, not necessarily forensic accounting, which i tink is a booming business now.. (If i'm not in my current unit, perhaps i would hv asked for permanent transfer to forensics)
I certainly din regret the experience at forensics. Tough but fulfilling =)
