interview/thank you

Michele graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Public Accounting and Business Administration from Coe College in Iowa. She graduated with over one hundred fifty credit hours so she was eligible to sit for the CPA exam right away. Michele’s aunt got her into the position she currently holds by passing along her resume to Grant Thornton’s audit practice leader at a T-ball game. The office brought Michele in for an interview and she has been with the company since she graduated college in 2007.

Michele’s responsibilities include planning, directing, and completing U.S. GAAP and GAAS audits for Grant Thornton clients by reviewing financial statements and related technical accounting issues. She spends about forty percent of her time writing, but these writings vary widely depending on the circumstances of the client. Email is her most frequent form of written communication. She emails to external clients and to internal team members and Grant Thornton affiliates discussing her audits, client consultations, client proposals, and employee performance reviews.

Here is a general list of the types of emails Michele sends:

· Good / bad client news

· Client proposal

· Internal to team members

· Grant Thornton affiliate

· Good / bad performance review

For a client with goods news, the email takes less than a minute to write and typically tells the client that the project is on time and nothing is wrong. For a client with bad news the email informs them that an error was found in the way they are accounting for a transaction. It could take between two and five minutes to write this email. However, Michele usually diverts this email to a phone call. Grant Thornton auditors are careful about the information they provide in emails. It is difficult to clearly illustrate a point in writing and the client may unintentionally withhold information about the circumstance, causing the auditor to make an uninformed decision. If the client then acts in the manner described by the auditor, Grant Thornton is held liable and the wording of the email could be used as evidence against them. For this reason phone calls are typically used for bad news.

Client proposals take up a large portion of Michele’s time. She can use a standard template but the details about the audit approach will vary for each client. These take an average of three hours. Clients that are familiar with Grant Thornton may only ask for an hourly schedule in their proposal, which is quick and easy to send. However, other clients request detailed descriptions of the audit practice and this requires hours to accomplish.

An internal email to an employee takes less than two minutes to write. For anything longer a phone call is used for efficiency. It is much easier to have a ten-minute phone conversation than to send twenty emails back and forth. Employees too must be careful about what they email back and forth to each other. If employees are joking about a client violating accounting policies and that client is found to be in violation of GAAP, Grant Thornton is liable. Even though the nature of the email was hypothetical, in court it would be interpreted as having knowledge of the fraud.

When Michele emails affiliates, it takes between two and five minutes depending on the topic. Language barriers are a concern when communicating with overseas affiliates. Any discussion must take place over the phone, and once a decision is reached, Michele immediately sends an email to the affiliate. The decision needs to be written in an email in case of future confusion.

For Michele, a good employee performance review may only take twenty minutes. She reviews the evaluation sheet the employee filled out and emails them to agree with their personal evaluation. A bad performance review may take her an hour to write. In these emails, Michele must start with positive feedback. She is cautious not to attack the employee when she discusses what they need to work on. She also advises them on how they can perform better in the future.

There is not a typical workweek for an auditor like Michele. Everyday is different depending on the circumstances of the client so she never knows the volume of each type of writing she will have to do that week. She does admit to spending more time writing at her job than she initially thought she would. When she first began, her writing consisted of checklists. Now, she writes much more and the volume of writing will only continue to increase as she moves up the corporate ladder.

My interview with Michele was very informative and I was surprised to learn that forty percent of her job consists of writing; I thought it would be less. Understandably her volume and type of writing is contingent on the client’s circumstances and will vary depending on the week. Despite the amount of writing, I still want to go into the audit field and because of this interview with Michele I am better prepared for the writing I will be doing.

If you have any further questions about my interview with Michele Bruess, please feel free to contact me.

Sincerely,

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