A doctor who orders a CT scan “just in case” is not doing it for the patient. They are doing it for themselves — so that, if a complaint is ever made, they can show they did everything possible. This is known as defensive medicine, and it has long been clear that it does not improve treatment. It drives up costs and draws attention away from what really matters.
The same in Polish audit
The same is happening in Polish audit. The equivalent of the unnecessary CT scan is evidence gathered not to audit the financial statements better, but to be able to defend oneself in an inspection. In a survey of 216 statutory auditors, 93.5% admitted that they gather more evidence than they need for fear of an inspection. 94% believe that oversight attaches more weight to documentation than to how the audit was carried out. 92.6% say that formal requirements make it harder for them to focus on risk analysis — that is, on what matters most in an audit.
Together, these three answers form a single picture: for auditors, documentation is the yardstick by which — they believe — they will be judged, so they gather more of it than the audit itself requires, at the expense of risk analysis, which is to say at the expense of what determines audit quality.
Time the audit does not get
This is not a question of auditors’ convenience but of audit quality. An auditor’s time is finite, and every additional task takes time away from another. An hour spent filling in forms for the inspector’s benefit is an hour missing from a conversation with management, the analysis of an unusual transaction or a second look at estimates. The file grows, but the audit does not get any better: documentation should be a record of the auditor’s work, not a substitute for it. Sociologists call this goal displacement — the means begins to take the place of the end.
Behind this behaviour there is also fear — the same mechanism that lawyers call the chilling effect: people give up what they are allowed to do because they are afraid of sanctions.
Signals, not individuals
If so many auditors act defensively, the problem does not lie with individuals but with the signals the system sends. If nearly every inspection ends with deficiencies being found, and most of the findings concern form, a rational auditor will invest in form. A yardstick that rewards a complete set of documents favours documenting; a yardstick that asks whether the audit was sound favours auditing. The answer, then, is not to encourage auditors to be braver, but to change the yardstick: to assess whether the audit provided reasonable assurance about the financial statements, not whether every form carries a full set of signatures.