Pros
The Auditor's Office offers challenging and diverse work assignments for audit staff, great benefits, and a highly valuable work experience. Audit assignments generally last six to nine months, and staff are then assigned to new audit topics with new supervisors and new audit teams. This arrangement enables audit staff members to work on a range of high-profile policy issues and gain a wide breadth of experience.
Cons
The office has a highly toxic culture perpetuated by upper management. Management has a single-minded focus on publishing hard-hitting audit reports that are hyper-critical of the departments and programs being audited. Audit teams face extreme pressure to uncover hard-hitting findings, and this pressure results in a highly negative, fear-based work environment. Audit principals and supervisors are often fearful of taking responsibility for audit mishaps, and instead assign blame to staff members in overly critical performance reviews. The pressure to identify hard-hitting findings also drives audit teams to work extreme amounts of overtime, sometimes for months on end. Although the office has implemented a new training program, supervisors often do not adequately guide or train staff members. Many supervisors are rude and indifferent to staff, and only reprimand staff for doing something wrong after the fact. Most members of management (including upper management) do not care about cultivating or developing staff; instead, they see staff as replaceable cogs in a machine. As a result, turnover is incredibly high among audit staff. The office has cycled through literally hundreds of audit staff over the years, and it is unusual for staff to last more than 2-3 years before quitting. Upper management also retaliates swiftly against those who speak out against its practices or defy their rules. Although several members of upper management like to cultivate new staff for the sake of gaining loyalty, they will quickly reject anyone who raise concerns relating to staff turnover or office governance. In addition, staff have been harshly punished for defying basic office protocol; for example, one staff member was fired for adding her gender pronouns to her standardized email signature plate. If you want to succeed as an auditor here, you need to work hard, and only speak up if you have an audit finding. Do not speak out against management, at least until management changes. If you can handle a couple of years working here, I would recommend securing some good references and then get out. The work experience will speak well for you, but your sanity and well-being are not worth staying here for the long term.
