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Study: Auditors’ Busy Season Has Dick to Do With Taxes

Indiana, PA – A study released Tuesday by the Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Employment Research provides irrefutable evidence that, contrary to popular belief, an auditor’s busy season has absolutely nothing to do with taxes.

“I’m just as surprised as the next guy,” said Sarah D’Amato, the lead researcher on the study. “Like every other family member or friend of an auditor, I’ve always assumed that my brother, an Ernest & Young accountant, spends every January through March filing taxes for clients.”

“But since the results prove otherwise, I can now understand why he always gets pissed when I ask him for tax advice. And why he always tells me to ‘Call H&R Fucking Block.’”

In interviews with more than 500 staff auditors at Big Four accounting firms, the researchers discovered that all auditors do during busy season is test a company’s processes and procedures to opine on the accuracy of a company’s reported financial statements.

“While this is just as painfully boring as filing 1040s, it doesn’t have anything to do with taxes,” D’Amato noted. “In fact, the closest most auditors get to the IRS during busy season is doubling the sales tax at dinner to calculate the tip.”

According to D’Amato, busy seasons are typically three things: “using calculators the size of pizza boxes and wearing ties in a casual environment to show their clients that they mean ‘business;’ beating up a clients’ junior staff for a month straight about the lack of internal controls because the signatures did not fully penetrate the triplicate on the department-wide birthday card for Larissa in Accounts Payable; and completing a 38-page internal controls checklist on the petty cash fund while completely ignoring the client’s shady accounting treatment for three new SPEs named HIDDENDEBT, IMSTEALING and DONTLOOKHEREPWC.”

Auditors were thrilled with the results.

“Finally the truth,” said KMPG Senior Laura Astrof. “Maybe now my parents will stop asking me how the taxes were in busy season, and start asking me how it feels to spend three months of my life preparing a detailed list of proposed accounting adjustments only to have my boss rollover on the golf course and deem them all ‘immaterial’ after the client offers to ‘give him that putt’ and ‘award him a large SOX 404 consulting project’ if we don’t make him book those pension adjustments.”

In a related story, the Center for Employment Research announced that the preliminary results for its Investment Banking study reveal that “most parents have absolutely no idea what their investment banker children do, and why they get paid so much freaking money to do it.