Internal Auditing means Using your Brain

This has been a dilemma for so long - making other people understand how literally brain-rattling and mind-boggling Internal Auditing is. At least in our company.

A lot of people have long since underestimated our department, and so far, I have grown tired of trying to prove them wrong - because I have just realized that I need not try. They ARE wrong.

Internal auditing has been a burden and a blessing. A blessing for it flexes our brain tissues, wears out our thinking caps, and even tires our logic and rational thinking, which they cannot get from simply doing the same thing everyday - checking receipts, updating their excel files, saving, printing, typing, updating the system, depositing the cash, coming back, typing again, saving, printing, going home. A blessing for it allows us to exercise judgment and character analysis, profiling people we meet just like in Criminal Minds. A blessing for it develops our grammar, improves our sentence construction, polishes our writing skills - for who else can concisely and precisely convey 5 thoughts in one sentence, with formality and classic elegance yet exudes authority and wisdom.

But at times, our work becomes a burden. Biologically, for it kills more brain cells than normal people do, exposes us more to light and radiation thanks to our nifty laptops. Wears our finger joints and makes us prone to arthritis from too much typing and clicking. Burdensome, for at times we face our enemies, give them smiles despite our earnest desire to stay away. We need a more modulated voice while talking to people just so they won't think they are being apprehended for pulling down the Eiffel tower, a straight face while watching them tell a lie and miserably sucking at it.

It's a heavy thing to carry - our burdens - because with these are the stares and the glares of people who do not understand. Who cannot and may not ever grasp the fact why we exist. Why we do what we do and do them the way we do. Who, for the love of God, cannot even start to comprehend why we look as if we're not doing anything, just sitting around staring at our screens or staring at the ceiling. They may not realize that inside our steady heads are the huge brains working overtime, trying, looking for even the tiniest loopholes that every other executive has failed to see.

We appear to be just chatting around or relaxing, holding that glass of cold water or mug of hot coffee - the only time they say they see us come out of our fortress. They see us talk to others, with a smile and an open joke that we laugh at every now and then. Or walking towards the mess hall or from the buffet area full from the "perks of our position". But they don't understand. These were just the times, the very short ones, that we consider as breaks, the time we interact with the outside world we tend to forget while deciphering, discerning, the facts of cases even investigators can't crack open. These are the links we keep alive, the very same links we get "useless" news from. So useless they help us understand the connections between who we are talking to and who we really need to talk to. What we are looking at against the thing we really need to look into.

But they don't understand. Instead they say our work is so easy that routine tasks you can do while sleeping is nastier. That adding figures is so much more challenging than convincing a manager that he has in fact bent rules and thinking it's fine. That saving files and printing them to be filed up in boxes is more interesting than interviewing five to six people and merging their stories to determine who really was at fault. That being busy typing and marking papers and receipts is more rewarding than figuring out how to help their company, OUR company, save hundred and hundreds of pesos every month.

Use your brain. Even just for a short while. Even for a minute a day. Try to understand - why internal auditing means using your brain.




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