Auditor Day Quotes

I will journey to the black heart of a corrupt empire to root out my foes. But Rome wasn't built in a day and it won't be restored by a lone Assassin. I am Ezio Auditore Da Firenze. This is my Brotherhood.

You bastards are on the top of Imperial Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan's very own shit list now, you bet. But under what name? Only five days on this benighted world, and already total strangers are trying to kill me.

His master plan to get them all out the door early met its first check of the day when he opened his closet door to discover that Zap the Cat, having penetrated the security of Vorkosigan House through Miles's quisling cook, had made a nest on the floor among his boots and fallen clothing to have kittens. Six of them. Zap ignored his threats about the dire consequences of attacking an Imperial Auditor, and purred and growled from the dimness in her usual schizophrenic fashion. Miles gathered his nerve and rescued his best boots and House uniform, at a cost of some high Vor blood, and sent them downstairs for a hasty cleaning by the overworked Armsman Pym. The Countess, delighted as ever to find her biological empire increasing, came in thoughtfully bearing a cat-gourmet tray prepared by Ma Kosti that Miles would have had no hesitation in eating for his own breakfast. In the general chaos of the morning, however, he had to go down to the kitchen and scrounge his meal. The Countess sat on the floor and cooed into his closet for a good half-hour, and not only escaped laceration, but managed to pick up, sex, and name the whole batch of little squirming furballs before tearing herself away to hurry and dress.

Chandler could outdrink a sponge, though he had been dealing with auditors all day, and if anything was an excuse to drink to excess, it was auditors.

Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings. Therefore let us not underestimate the use of words in psychotherapy, and let us be satisfied if we may be auditors of the words which are exchanged between the analyst and his patient.

The day came indeed when her breathless auditors learnt from her in bewilderment that what ailed him was that he was, alas, simply not serious. Maisie wept on Mrs Wix’s bosom after hearing that Sir Claude was a butterfly; considering moreover that her governess but half-patched it up in coming out at various moments the next few days with the opinion that it was proper to his ‘station’ to be careless and free.

We crossed to the sea wall. It was a clear night, very beautiful, very still - you will not remember it. I took a photo to file away for the auditor who will one day decree whether I gave you a happy childhood or not, but it came out black. I like to think the image is tucked away in your mind, though, informing the man you will one day become. This is what I like to think: that it's all there, or not all of it, just the good stuff - the midsummer stars as keen as anything, the moon gilding the waves silver, the horizon a dark expanse, the world before man. The lack of bearings took down my fever too, Sailor, which was a different type of fever altogether, a fever which on one level I hope you don't inherit, and on another I pray you do, it being the fever that makes life interesting. I felt good, little Sailor, I felt like myself. I started singing to you, not because I can sing, but despite the fact that I can't.

From modest origins, the Treasury offices proliferated until they occupied the entire block. The 1791 city directory gives an anatomy of this burgeoning department, with 8 employees in Hamilton’s office, 13 in the comptroller’s, 15 in the auditor’s, 19 in the register’s, 3 in the treasurer’s, 14 in the office for settling accounts between the federal government and the states, and 21 in the customs office on Second Street, with an additional 122 customs collectors and surveyors scattered in various ports. By the standards of the day, this represented a prodigious bureaucracy. For its critics, it was a monster in the making, inciting fears that the department would become the Treasury secretary’s personal spy force and military machine. Swollen by the Customs Service, the Treasury Department payroll ballooned to more than five hundred employees under Hamilton,

Over the past year, as I have been working with the global tax-accounting firm KPMG to help their tax auditors and managers become happier, I began to realize that many of the employees were suffering from an unfortunate problem. Many of them had to spend 8 to 14 hours a day scanning tax forms for errors, and as they did, their brains were becoming wired to look for mistakes. This made them very good at their jobs, but they were getting so expert at seeing errors and potential pitfalls that this habit started to spill over into other areas of their lives. Like the Tetris players who suddenly saw those blocks everywhere, these accountants experienced each day as a tax audit, always scanning the world for the worst. As you can imagine, this was no picnic, and what’s more, it was undermining their relationships at work and at home. In performance reviews, they noticed only the faults of their team members, never the strengths. When they went home to their families, they noticed only the C’s on their kids’ report cards, never the A’s. When they ate at restaurants, they could only notice that the potatoes were underdone—never that the steak was cooked perfectly. One tax auditor confided that he had been very depressed over the past quarter. As we discussed why, he mentioned in passing that one day during a break at work he had made an Excel spreadsheet listing all the mistakes his wife had made over the past six weeks. Imagine the reaction of his wife (or soon to be ex wife) when he brought that list of faults home in an attempt to make things better. Tax auditors are far from the only ones who get stuck in this

She’d never realized how much humans were controlled by their bodies. The thing nagged night and day. It was always too hot, too cold, too empty, too full, too tired… The key was discipline, she was sure. Auditors were immortal. If she couldn’t tell her body what to do, she didn’t deserve to have one. Bodies were a major human weakness. Senses, too. The Auditors had hundreds of senses, since every possible phenomenon had to be witnessed and recorded. She could only find five available now. Five ought to be easy to deal with. But they were wired directly into the rest of the body! They didn’t just submit information, they made demands! She’d walked past a stall selling roasted meats and her mouth had started to drool! The sense of smell wanted the body to eat without consulting the brain! But that wasn’t the worst part! The brain itself did its own thinking!

Much of the negation poisoning the democratic process has stemmed from a confusion of the personal and the statistical. I may hold down an excellent job, but the failure of the stimulus to meet its targets infuriates me. I may live in peaceful Vienna, Virginia, safe from harm—but a report that several Americans have died violently in Kabul appears like a fatal failure of authority. By dwelling on the plane of gross statistics, I become vulnerable to grandiose personal illusions: that if I compel the government to move in this direction or that, I can save the Constitution, say, or the earth, or stop the war, or end poverty now. Though my personal sphere overflows with potentiality, I join the mutinous public and demand the abolition of the established order. This type of moral and political displacement is nothing new. The best character in the best novel by Dickens, to my taste, is Mrs. Jellyby of Bleak House, who spent long days working to improve “the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger,” while, in her London home, her small children ran wild and neglected. Dickens termed this “telescopic philanthropy”—the trampling of the personal sphere for the sake of a heroic illusion. Mrs. Jellyby, sitting in quite a nest of waste paper, drank coffee all the evening and dictated at intervals to her eldest daughter. She also held a discussion with Mr. Quale, the subject of which seemed to be—if I understood it—the brotherhood of humanity, and gave utterance to some beautiful sentiments. I was not so attentive an auditor as I might have wished to be, however, for Peepy and the other children came flocking about Ada and me in a corner of the drawing-room to ask for another story; so we sat down among them and told them in whispers “Puss in Boots” and I don’t know what else until Mrs. Jellyby, accidentally remembering them, sent them to bed.3 The revolt of the public has had a telescopic and Jellybyan aspect to it. Though they never descended to details, insurgents assumed that, by symbolic gestures and sheer force of desire, they could refashion the complex systems of democracy and capitalism into a personalized utopia. Instead, unknowingly, they crossed into N. N. Taleb’s wild “Extremistan,” where “we are subjected to the tyranny of the singular, the accidental, the unseen, and the unpredicted.” In that unstable country, “you should always be suspicious of the knowledge you derive from data.”4 I can’t command a complex social system like the United States, but I can control my political expectations of it: I can choose to align them with reality. To seize this alternative, I must redirect the demands I make on the world from the telescopic to the personal, because actionable reality resides in the personal sphere. I can do something about losing my job, for example, but I have no clue what could or should be done about the unemployment rate. I know directly whether a law affects my business for better or worse, but I have no idea of its effect on the gross domestic product. I can assist a friend in need, but I have little influence over the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger. Control, however tenuous, and satisfaction, however fleeting, can only be found in the personal sphere, not in telescopic numbers reported by government. A

The money Ivar had spent on the Bernings’ vacation was well worth it. As the details of the new preferred issue were being finalized, Ivar’s auditor – the one man who might have asked penetrating questions about the accounting details of the deal – had been just where Ivar wanted him: strolling the streets of London and Paris with his wife. Ivar said he wanted A.D. Berning to meet Krister Littorin in Stockholm. He also wanted to take care of Mrs Berning. Ivar advised that “Miss Littorin asks if Mrs Berning should like to stay with her in the south of Sweden a couple of days in which case she would meet you in Malmoe.”54 Mrs Berning was delighted to receive such royal treatment.

Increasingly, I have become concerned that the motivation to meet Wall Street earnings expectations may be overriding common sense business practices,” he said. “Too many corporate managers, auditors, and analysts are participants in a game of nods and winks. In the zeal to satisfy consensus earnings estimates and project a smooth earnings path, wishful thinking may be winning the day over faithful representation. As a result, I fear that we are witnessing an erosion in the quality of earnings, and therefore, the quality of financial reporting. Managing may be giving way to manipulation. Integrity may be losing out to illusion.” It was a remarkable speech.

Max stood there for a while. The man finished his meal and said, “Where are you headed, young man?” “I don’t know.” “Aha! There is your problem. You'll never get there if you don’t know where you are going. On that note, I say good day to you, Max.” Max watched as the old man left. His anger had propelled him up the mountain, yet he did not know where he was going. Max hadn’t even changed clothes. He still wore the new suit and dress shoes he had worn to meet the auditor. “Huh… I found a Zen master in a hole-ridden plaid,” Max told himself. Max looked out of the door and saw the flock of sheep come up over the horizon. His heart beat faster as he expected Isobel to be with them. Instead, Ken the Watcher guarded the sheep. “Don’t stay too long, or the earl will charge you rent, young man,” Ken said with a laugh to Max. “I’d never get rich that way,” Max said to himself. He then went out from where the sheep had come, his feet moving him towards the White Mountain of Cairnbahan.

He’d heard of it. It gave you ironic distance—a very now kind of high. Conspiracy people thought it was too zeitgeisty to be a coincidence, claimed it was spread to soften the population for its miserable lot. In his day—eight years before—the scourge had been called “Now,” something they gave to source-code auditors and drone pilots to give them robotic focus. He’d eaten a shit-ton of it while working on zepps. It made him feel like a happy android. The conspiracy people had said the same thing about Now that they said about Meta. End of the day, anything that made you discount objective reality and assign a premium to some kind of internal mental state was going to be both pro-survival and pro–status-quo.

handle it with your MAA.” So after I recanted, admitted to what they wanted me to admit to, said I didn’t see what I saw, and created “good effects,” the church took away my ability to move up to the next OT level (even though I had already been made to do the first course of OT VI at night until midnight for four weeks). When I returned home I would no longer continue to move up the auditing side of the Bridge to the highest OT levels, but would be required to train as an auditor on the other side of the Bridge—the training side. It wasn’t just a change of direction but also a major slap on the wrist, a demotion of sorts. Training—as much as eight to twelve hours per day of drilling the data and delivering Scientology to others—was a clear punishment. They basically said, She’s trouble, so let’s punish her. I fully believed that this directive came from specific individuals, not LRH policy.

Madame de la Tour occasionally read aloud some affecting history of the Old or New Testament. Her auditors reasoned but little upon these sacred volumes, for their theology centred in a feeling of devotion towards the Supreme Being, like that of nature: and their morality was an active principle, like that of the Gospel. These families had no particular days devoted to pleasure, and others to sadness. Every day was to them a holyday, and all that surrounded them one holy temple,