You've heard the old saw about those who ignore the past are condemned to repeat it.  The same goes for audits.  Ignore our recommendations and the waste, fraud, or risk exposure will continue.

Auditors are historians. We study the past, gather evidence, make causal connections, and document our research with the hope that things could be done better.  While historians do not produce findings - no criteria or recommendations - they have a greater breadth and reach than auditors.  Historians study the interplay of policies, organizations, and personalities. 

Auditors generally try to avoid personnel matters and happenstance, and instead focus on on-going management issues and work procedures.  Broken work processes, risk exposure, deteriorated service quality, and financial problems can all be ultimately traced back to a manager's poor performance.  While we may privately conclude that the manager is a bozo, we let others, such as reporters and future historians, reach that conclusion.

Despite the narrower scope of auditing, it can still have great significance.  Historians routinely remind us that the course of a nation was often determined by the efficiency and effectiveness of its armies, explorers, and clerks. "For want of a nail...the kingdom was lost" is a time-honored explanation of the little things that can change the outcome of a war and a civilization. 

Auditors are historians in another way:  we track the extent of an organization's capital.  Healthy organizations dedicate a portion of their on-going revenues toward expenditures that produce long-term future benefits.  Bridges, water systems, parks, public buildings - they all produce benefits for current and future generations.  Their measure reminds us whether we are indeed leaving the world a better place than we found it.  I think the word "commonwealth" is a marvelous description of what we inherit with good government.  

In this way, a community's infrastructure is a register of its history.  Often in lean times the new investments are fewer, while the periods of growth leave a rich engineering and architectural record.  In Portland, many bridges, schools, sewer lines, and streetcar lines were built between 1910 and 1930.  This "building boom" also means a liability boom if subsequent maintenance efforts do not keep pace.   

On a shorter cycle time, auditors also know that good organizations have history embedded in their operations and culture and use it to guide their efforts toward success.  Learning organizations evaluate past efforts and tune their performance to improve results.  Sometimes it is simple folklore: mistakes are remembered and shared; risks are described and successful strategies explained; the ironic, the humorous, the tragic, the quirky, the traumatic all teach lessons and can grow a culture of learning.

There seems to be a bias against our predecessors.  We often think that the work of the past, the viewpoints, the strategies are somehow inferior to ours.  We even ask ourselves, "What were they thinking?" without even making the effort to really find out what they were thinking.  Because we assume we are smarter than those people in the past. Of course we know so much more than those blockheads, fogies, Neanderthals, and yes even geezers.

Sadly, new regimes often abandon the wisdom of the past.  A new mayor who defeated an incumbent often wants to distinguish his administration by dismantling the loser's initiatives so he can take credit for every success. But sometimes an old bridge only needs some repairs, and the siren song of new construction needs to be resisted. Auditors know that there is no glory in maintenance work and as a result grass cutting often takes a back seat to ribbon-cutting.

Turnover of too many senior personnel is a loss of institutional memory.  Without that history something is more likely to go wrong. Sometimes turnover can be good of course, when the organization is seriously broken or the culture is toxic. Great things can happen when new outsiders apply a fresh look at the duties and challenges of an organization.

Our audit experience teaches us some important lessons.  Our findings often show that current problems are the result of past problem-solving efforts.  For example, over-correction of a problem often produces its own adverse consequences, like a drunk careening down a street, weaving from curb to curb.  Or forgetting that a government program may exist to avoid large costs elsewhere: closing mental health facilities and then seeing the former residents taking up jail beds instead.   

Some readers may recall Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 1970s.  He is still very active and is a founding member of the Long Now Foundation (along with Brian Eno for those 1970s rock fans who remember Roxy Music).  The organization "encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries."  Their website (www.longnow.org/about) has a chart showing the time horizon for some aspects of our lives.  The longest is nature, meaning that natural changes are often measured in millennia.  This is followed by culture which changes over centuries, then governance, infrastructure, commerce, with fashion following a short meandering track.  

Auditors think longer-term but not to the extent of the Long Now Foundation.  This is year 02007 according to the Foundation, to remind us that the lives of natural systems, as well as things like nuclear waste depositories, are measured in years with five or more digits.  

The physical assets in the community and the operational culture of the organization are the long now and auditors play a key role reminding everyone what was inherited from the past, what we must do to leave things better for the future.

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