Thursday, May 23, 2013

IRS: Pressing need for an ISO audit.

Hugh Hewitt is under the impression that what is needed to deal with the IRS abuse scandal (which now apparently includes a 90% audit rate for adoptive parents) is an independent prosecutor.  Now, while that may be a good idea--despite the low success rate of such prosecutors due to stonewalling--what might work better is to unleash a few experienced ISO auditors on the IRS and give them authority to issue findings and require corrections.

How could this work?  Well, an ISO auditor generally starts at the shipping dock and tracks a shipment back to its component parts through the full process.  He talks to each process owner and asks them two simple questions:

What did you do?  and
Can you show me the documents that tell you how to do your job?

In general, minor findings are when a person ignores published procedures, and major findings exist either when those procedures do not exist, or when management circumvents the published procedures. 

In this case, I'd expect that a good ISO auditor would figure out that the relevant documents are unused due to access, complexity, and corporate culture within an hour.  It could literally be orders of magnitude faster than an independent prosecutor.

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