What life?!?

Ok thanks bro, I am still struggling to choose haha, wish God can lend me a hand..

True ..labor day also working

Just apply all, see which one calls you for interview.

If given the choice, opt for PwC as the first choice and Deloitte the last choice.

my only tips.
work smart and hard.


2022 will be my 8th year in audit and i enjoyed it.

Good luck.

Working hours will definitely be very long tbh. However, dont give up and be sad on this itself. There will be a lot of exposure that you will gain working as an auditor because you get to work with a lot of clients from different industries. So there is how you gain exposure which you cannot have in commercial. So once in, hold onto it for at least a few years to make the experience a worthy one before deciding to move on to other finance roles.

As to which big 4 to choose, well all of them are really not too bad among each other. It all down to what position and engagement exposure they are providing to you.

Forget about work life balance in Audit. It's tedious works and super long working hours including weekends. Unless you plan to not perform well or don't wanna learn much, then you can just chill and don't give a damn but surely of course you'll get a lot of scolding and hatred from your colleagues.

Speaking about Big 4 , does anyone know how's the life for pentesters there?

Not from this area nor understand what does an auditor do. Why is it such a long working hours? Why can't there be some automation? E.g. software that can assist in cutting down redundant work?

Well, essentially the auditor works on behalf of the company/client shareholders in order to ensure that management is not being sohai with their investments from the accounting perspective while also ensuring those same accounting matters are aligned with the relevant accounting rules/standards. Long working hours can come in many forms; client providing supporting documents to be worked on late... which then results in needing to spend time to audit the information provided while also working on the "next client's file" in the calendar so to speak since it's rare for an auditor to just have a single client at any one time unless that client is significant in size / complexity kind of thing; so the timetables and therefore timelines are pretty tight; so when clients provide information late, it screws it up & can only be covered with elongated working hours (this is one of the reasons lah)

So in Msia, a lot of entities simply aren't using a streamlined accounting system where all invoices (for example in the billing side of the entity) have a somewhat similar form of format; therefore it's pretty impossible for "digitalisation" to help ensure a sample size of selected invoices for vetting is indeed valid / matched with the actualised figures within the clients' accounting system. Digitalisation is only able to be employed if there's enough standardisation within the client's system and this is rarely the case since this would be incredibly expensive for entities to employ (which doesn't even improve their profit margins from a business point of vies) & is therefore mainly used in sample selection of transactions to be tested in order to avoid any human-bias in that selection. AI simply isn't "there" yet & thus the significant chunk of audit work requires human discernment & analysis in order to be reasonably assured that things are err.... "free from material misstatement" so to speak.

but this is just from my experience lah from several years ago, maybe things have changed but... doubt it lah from conversations i've had with current folks in the audit line recently

For example ah...

Although Ms Word has spellcheck function, we still need to read word by word (pairing up with another colleague to listen to me) literally to check for any spelling errors on the financial statements and notes to the financial statements. Often time, there are still errors not picked up by Ms Word.

Wait until the day lor when artificial intelligence/technology could surpass the cognitive ability of human beings.

This post has been edited by Blofeld: Feb 13 2022, 11:43 AM

From Tax side
There's a lot of manual work in macroed excel files.
Software to enable staff to have an easier life is available..thompson reuters and other big software vendor got sell. But licensing fees very expensive so gotta do it the hard way

Thanks you guys for the explanation and analogy. Now I understand why.

Just curious, is there anyone here work in KPMG as well... If yes, then we may have lunch at One Utama yo (If I am in the office lah) ahahahah.

how is your work going?

enjoying your work life?

The words Audit and Life don’t go together.