2020 THE YEAR THE AUDITS WENT
VIRTUAL
Many CFOs have had to carry out their scheduled audits virtually when the Covid-19 pandemic forced everyone to work from home. These are some of the lessons they’ve learnt. By Kate Thompson Davy
T
here’s a famous quote attributed to US businessman Norman Ralph Augustine about the reach of auditors. He reportedly said: “Twothirds of the Earth's surface is covered with water. The other third is covered with auditors from headquarters”. And while Augustine might have been poking fun, in 2020 auditors were in the air, in the wires, and in their homes all at once. Here, in discussion with CFO South Africa, six top financial and audit professionals walk us through their shift to virtual and remote audits in 2020.
Into the rural areas Nico Esterhuizen is the global CFO of humanitarian and development organisation Joint Aid Management (JAM) International. He told us “a virtual audit is no joke and tough on resources!” Even in a normal year (AKA not 2020), he explains, the nature of their operations makes for difficult audit
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processes. He says: “Our key operations are in some of the most rural areas in Africa. Although we have a country office in each programme country (with at least one finance manager) our actual operations happen in areas such as refugee camps. For example, in Uganda, we operate in the Imvepi Refugee Settlement. Given this, source documents often originate at these camps or settlements. This means to track and to get hold of these documents is difficult.” They usually fly the source documents back to the country office, where they would be stored at warehouses, and scan them for virtual storage in a central database, he explains. “If we have access to reliable internet at any of the camps or settlements, we use flatbed scanners to upload source documents to a central database for our global support office, based in Johannesburg, to review while the original source documents make their way to the country office.” Covid-19 flight restrictions, thus, introduced a whole
