work before 3 days straight with no sleep if WLB is a core concern, audit life would probably be unsuitable; however having at least a couple years with them is indeed valuable

This post has been edited by danielcmw: Jan 4 2022, 09:56 AM

This means working 72-ish hours straight; only going home to change clothes & shower..... but yea life as auditor is as such

It's really hard to say; since it'll depend on individual department / partner / manager & team... broadly i have friends from all four of the big4 firms and they're all somewhat similar in nature (culturally speaking). so sorry i'm not able to confidently recommend any single firm on this

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