An auditor's the corporate version of a reporter

The way I am so tired of the shock and amaze when I tell people I qualified as a chartered accountant and practiced as an auditor, yet have established a career as a writer. In their minds an auditor is a pocket protector-wearing, paper-shuffling, elbow-patched number cruncher with the personality of beige paint drying to the sound of grass growing.

That, my friends, is an actuary, not an auditor. (My apologies to my actuary friends.)

An auditor is the corporate version of a reporter. Just with infinitely better pay. Seriously. Sometimes I miss it. Then I remember I reclaimed my soul and that the soul is worthless, and then I cri evrytiem.

The people auditors and commercial journalists report to are similar. Jane Warona and her bougie friends. But the primary audience of an auditor, in audits of companies, is still those who own shares in it, despite attempts to change this audience to be more broad. The will of the owners of capital carries in capitalist societies.

Much like a commercial media journalist's primary audience is those who subscribe to the paper. Because the owners of the paper's capital can monetise and on-sell their attention to make a pretty penny. Well, not anymore. The pennies being made in media these days are helluva petit. Except if you're Naspers.

An auditor is the corporate version of a reporter.

Please tell your friends. Tell them to tell their friends and theirs theirs. Save me yet another look of astonishment. Save me from laboured attempts on my part to dispel their misunderstanding, which more and more I'm beginning to judge as gross ignorance.

I hate judging people. And judge the people who make me judge them for making me judge them.

Before, I used to explain that some of these things were a recent trend. I'd concede that maybe auditors were, at some point in the distant past, way, way before my time, these dry AF number crunchers of everyone's imagining.

"But I was not like them, hey," I'd say.

I'd explain that the new principles and regulations that came to the profession in the wake of the late 1980s and 1990s corporate scandals shook the profession from the bottom up. I'd say the auditing I trained and qualified in had more of a basis in sociology in its theories of the behaviour of human beings in corporate systems of process and control — and in criminology, a branch of sociology, in its theories on the modes, prevention and detection of fraud and corruption.

Information systems and information theory, too. CAVR! CAVR! Sorry. Inside joke. And ethics. Ethics, I'd plead. Auditing theory and practice is laden first and foremost with considerations of ethical behaviour in corporate settings—what gives rise to it and how it is lost.

Also, I'd say, I spent more time writing and reviewing interpretations of fact, frameworks and law than I did crunching numbers. The client's financial management applications and my laptop did most of the number crunching.

My eyes were trained to be on the bigger picture — the greater significance of the little things summed up.

All I needed to know of numbers was how they worked, I said. I'm terrible at numbers, I'd add. Terrible. And don't fucking ask me to do your taxes.

Drawing myself fully erect I'd say, "Given that most economies today are organised by capitalism and, beyond the corporate sector, neoliberal principles, what the corporation represents is a unit of society and each audit an ethnography of that unit."

It's like reporting, but on steroids, I said.

It's funny how unimaginative some people are. And how unwilling they are to deviate from checkboxes. I was laughed out of many a room and met with silences that lingered for months on end after I'd hit the send button. Until I wasn't. And then I was again. And wasn't. And was. And…

Little to do with me.

Did I mention that the media industry is in spot of bother? That lack of imagination coming home to roost.

Nowadays I just say, contemplatively, "You know… some people are left brained. Others are right brained. Me? I'm whole brained."