Client stories

What people say after the findings meeting

Comments reference specific engagements. Voices differ in length and tone—some praise the clarity; others note where preparation could have been tighter.

They traced a cluster of late-month journals to a single approval path we had never stress-tested. The memo was blunt about what they could not prove, which helped us brief the committee without overstatement.

— Mei-Ling Chen, Finance Director, regional manufacturing group · Fraud Review Engagement

Our exception log had grown for two years. The clearance schedule they returned finally told us which overrides still lacked evidence and which were noise. I wish we had narrowed the population before fieldwork; we lost two days on that.

— Robert Hsu, Internal Audit Manager · Exception Testing

The walkthrough with our AP clerks was practical. No jargon parade—just following a rush payment from request to bank file. We found the skip point in under an hour.

— Aisha Rahman, Controller, logistics subsidiary · Control Walkthrough

After the review, remediation support kept us honest. They retested cleared items instead of accepting our screenshots at face value. The tone stayed firm but workable.

— Thomas Berg, CFO, family-owned trading company · Findings Remediation Support

Document requests were specific from day one. We spent less time hunting folders and more time answering real questions about cut-off around Chinese New Year shipments.

— Yuki Nakamura, Group Reporting Lead · Fraud Review Engagement

Extended story: late-month journals in a manufacturing group

The constraint

A regional manufacturer saw unexplained credit entries in two subsidiaries during the final three days of two consecutive months. Internal audit had sampled invoices but not the approval path for manual journals above NT$500,000.

What we did

Under a fraud review engagement, we mapped preparers and approvers, then tested every manual journal above that threshold for six months. Supporting packs were incomplete for eleven items; three shared the same secondary approver who was also a related-party contact for a vendor.

Outcome

Management paused that approval path, recovered one duplicated payment, and asked counsel to review the related-party link. Our memo stated clearly which items remained unexplained because records were missing—so the committee knew the limit of the evidence.

Extended story: clearing a two-year exception backlog

The constraint

A logistics controller inherited an override log with more than four thousand lines. The board wanted comfort before the external auditors arrived.

What we did

Exception testing began by splitting mechanical duplicates from judgment overrides. We tested one hundred twenty high-risk items and a random slice of the remainder. Failures concentrated in rush payments without purchase orders during peak season.

Outcome

The clearance schedule gave internal audit a reusable format. The controller noted that two fieldwork days were lost because the population had not been filtered before our start—feedback we now raise in every scoping call.