the scene at PWC's office in Hyderabad

Having worked in the audit profession, I can picture the scene at PWC's office in Hyderabad these is what it could look like

The entire audit team of PWC would have been redeployed on Satyams e-audit workpapers, all scheduled leaves, vacations and other audit assignments would have been called off, beleive me, its worse than army deployments (PWC was the first to go on electronic audit documentation in India)

Article clerks will be given the mundane tasks of scanning the documents given by the seniors, seniors will be sharing confidential papers with the managers, managers will be wondering what to shred and what not to

There will be a set of article clerks who will be filling out the checklists including questions on Integrity of management, fraud checklist, accounting standard checklists etc

There will be a huge demand for green and red pens, after all linking of all audit work papers would need to be done...

Audit confirmations will be treated like GOLD, seniors would be combing the postal section of PWC's office to trace if at all any banks/debtors had confirmed balances. on PWC's stationary...... senior managers will be telling the seniors ..." I told you not to rely on email confirmations"

Someone, would definitely be searching for the management rep letter if at all signed by Raju

Managers and Senior Managers will now be recasting the reasons used in the variance analysis - a very popular tool used to audit balance sheet items..... imagine the answers which would have been documented for increase in cash balances, receivables and for non-increase in liabitlites......

And finally, someone will cast the schedules given (this practice has been done away with)... good chances are that someone will discover that higher bank balances of Rs. 5K crores were a result of casting errors, i.e. 10 FD's of Rs. 100,000,000 FD would have been shown as Rs. 10,000,000,000 on the excel schedule (with an extra 0) and the totals would have been a number entered on the cell, rather than a formula on the cell..... well if this happens to be the case, there is no audit negligence right..........

Well i beleive at the end of the day, no amount of form i.e. checklists etc) can hide the substance of the transaction..... Substance is truly greater than form