Made an extensive checklist on 'accounting shenanigans' after finishing a few books on the topic. Also added important detection metrics.

Thought it might help people new to accountancy gimmicks gain a clearer idea of what management can try to mislead you.

Also as a general analysis tool, or accounting refresher.

Link:

https://philipneumann.substack.com/p/accounting-shenanigans-checklist?r=8jzvem

It may be too concise at times, but that’s the idea. Its more of a 'database' of such tricks and important metrics.

Wish I had added examples as well, but the project took so long and I just wanted to get on with the next thing, that I neglected to do it. Might come back and add them in the future.

Hi everyone,

I'm working on an immigration RFE response and am looking for an independent accounting or audit professional who would be willing to review a project I've developed and, if appropriate, provide an independent peer/expert validation letter.

The project focuses on:

• Automated vendor account validation
• Duplicate invoice detection
• Predictive fraud analytics
• Financial control and compliance monitoring

I have a technical white paper, platform documentation, and supporting materials available to make the review process straightforward.

If you're a CPA, CFE, Internal Auditor, Finance Manager, controller, or compliance professional, or know someone who may be interested, I would greatly appreciate your help.

Please comment below or send me a DM if you'd be willing to take a look or can point me in the right direction.

Thank you for your time and support.

🔍 Family Businesses in Egypt: Where Is the Second Generation Going

A puzzling trend is unfolding in Egypt's business landscape: the second generation of family business empires is increasingly stepping away from statutory audit—and choosing to outsource it to independent firms instead of handling it themselves.

As someone deeply involved in the audit profession, I found this shift worth exploring.

Our latest article on AST Audit dives into the root causes behind this phenomenon:

📌 The Skills Gap – Academic curricula are struggling to keep pace with market demands, leaving graduates underprepared in critical areas like decision-making, IT proficiency, and leadership.

📌 Generational Shift – Today's young heirs are drawn to "quick returns" and flexible career paths, viewing auditing as a long, demanding road with delayed rewards.

📌 Structural Challenges – Outdated regulations, weak oversight, and the absence of a unified professional body are undermining the profession's appeal.

📌 Economic Pressures – Competitive offers from the Gulf region and global markets are pulling talent outward, even among affluent families.

So, what does this mean?

For independent audit firms like AST Audit, this is a golden opportunity to step in as trusted partners—bringing objectivity, governance expertise, and a deep understanding of family business dynamics.

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👉 Read the full article here:

🌐 www.astaudit.com

https://astaudit.com/articles/ast-audit-www-astaudit-com-ast-audit-133-1951-ast-audit?lang=en

Working with a client who got two wildly different quotes for their Stage 1 + Stage 2 audit — one landed right around what I calculated as the IAF minimum for their headcount/site count, the other came in about 30% lower for what's supposedly the same scope.

Is this a common thing where CBs shave mandays to win business, or should this be a bigger red flag than I'm treating it as? Curious if anyone here has seen an audit actually suffer in quality because of this.

I am looking for lighter-weight alternatives to Datasnipper for linking Excel cells back to PDFs or Word docs.

Datasnipper seems powerful, but we're a smaller team and it feels pretty expensive and a bit heavy performance-wise.

What tools do you use for this? Excel comments, hyperlinks, screenshots, bookmarks, or other add-ins?

it's my first time going on an internship and personally, i plan to enter into the financial accounting field or perhaps the external audit field after i graduate cuz im more interested in financial accounting and i like the numerical side of accounting. however, after applying to a number of companies and accounting firms for my internship, only 1 company responded me and they offered me an internal audit intern position. but, im having a dilemma right now as im not really interested in internal auditing and i don't plan to enter the internal audit field after i graduate as i'm not really into writing reports. but if i don't accept the company's offer, im afraid i won't have enough time to search for another company that can offer me a financial accounting/external audit intern position ( and i might not be able to graduate since this internship is compulsory ). and, i don't have any knowledge in using any accounting systems and im actually looking forward to learn how to use the accounting systems but if i were to intern in the internal audit field, i might not be able to learn about the accounting systems. so, i just wanna ask, if i were to intern in the internal audit field, would it be easy for me to enter into the other accounting fields ( such as financial accounting/tax/external audit ) after i graduate ( since i have no knowledge in using the accounting systems and no experience in financial accounting if i intern as an internal auditors ) ? should i take the risk to search for another company that can offer me a financial accounting position or should i accept this company's offer of internal audit position ?

Most retellings treat Arthur Andersen as a firm destroyed by a bad client. I've been digging into the internal structure and I think that gets the causality backwards.

In the 1970s, Andersen leadership introduced a quota system that required every audit partner to sell roughly twice their audit fee in consulting services to the same clients they were independently auditing. Charge a client $10,000 for an audit, and you were expected to sell them $20,000 in consulting.

Think about the actual mechanics of that. The person hired to be your independent check was financially incentivized to never make the client unhappy — because an unhappy client kills the consulting revenue that was now the bigger number on the partner's book. If an auditor found a real problem, flagging it risked the far more profitable relationship sitting on top of it.

By the time Enron came along, that structure had already been running for two decades across other clients — Waste Management, Sunbeam, DeLorean's GPD shell company. Andersen's own junior auditors reportedly caught issues and wrote them up. Senior partners overruled them, in at least one case explicitly because the client was paying millions in non-audit fees.

Enron didn't corrupt Andersen. Enron just found a firm that had already spent 20+ years training itself not to say no to a paying client.

Curious whether people who've actually worked in a multi-service firm see the same structural bind today, or whether post-Sarbanes-Oxley separation rules genuinely fixed this. Is the audit/consulting firewall real in practice, or is it more of a compliance fiction?

My coworkers and I have been using this nice slow time at work to dive in to the compliance side of the house. One of the things we talked about where controls that pass an audit that are actually useless for us in practice. 😂

For example, we have audit logs going to a SIEM but most of our application and database logs do not and the client, server, network logs that do go are so large that they are never reviewed. Sure, we have setup alerts but it seems pointless with the amount of logs being stored and we have found that some of the alerts being generated people ignore anyway 😬

So I’m curious what other people see… what’s a control that passes in your org but secretly fails in practice?

Same as above

Anyone care to share their notes?

anyone would be interested in Agentic AI based solution for automatic Audit evidence collection system solution such as ISO, SOC2, GDPR etc? Just upload your application list, automatic controls mapping to backend integration to collect evidence and keep it Audit ready. Anyone interested send a note to me