Auditing is not 'boot camp'. All professional firms do, however, make quasi-exploitative use of their junior, recent-graduate employees.
Everything depends upon how in detail this scheme is used. IBM's law firm, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, recruits fearsomely bright young lawyers from the major law schools---chiefly Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Stanford, with a sprinkling from elsewhere, pays them extremely well, overworks them, and practices an announced policy of up-or-out, become-a-partner-or-leave. This scheme works well, for clients and even for many who leave. Most, not all, accounting firms employ mediocre undergraduate accounting majors. (Graduate, professional-school training in accounting is still rare.) A scheme of apprenticeship training is mostly used instead. In the upshot the creative accountants employed by brokerage firms, major insurance companies, and the like are often much smarter than the auditors who are supposed to keep them on the straight and narrow. This scheme works much less well. It is hard, however, to see how auditors can be dispensed with. I do not think they can be. Better training is, as usual, the key to better performance; but the current auditing-firm business model provides no significant economic incentive for improving the IT auditing function or for staffing it with abler people. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
