"I've never worked professionally as an auditor, but I learned in school while writing papers that if your asked for certain bullet points and you stray from that, it will affect your grade. Say you have to write a paper on King Tut but you stray to his wife and family and most of your paper is focused on them, your grade will reflect your distracted focus and not the "

"Yes, that's something that happens from time to time to everyone. If you miss a documentation error, it's embarrassing and can open the door to more questions. I was a second round reviewer and missed that some of the documentation provided was from the previous year. I never looked at the year of the date, only the beginning of the date. It was embarrassing, and when my boss reviewed it, we quickly found out that it was missed by two lines of review. We had to go to the client and find the correct documentation. It didn't take long to correct it, but I missed it and should have found it myself."

This is important because you'll run into documentation errors. Early in your career or even late, you'll miss something. It's human nature to overlook something, which is why most audits have several layers of auditors or reviewers to find these things. When you miss something or have a documentation error slip through that's found by another layer, it's humbling and sometimes discouraging. Use it as an important learning opportunity.

When you make a documentation error, you need to bounce back. Maybe you provided too much documentation and the external auditors are now digging deeper into a direction that you can't answer. You need to adjust and learn from the mistake.

"Yes. When I was in my first year of auditing, I provided one document that should have been excluded. The external auditors ripped that apart and requested more documentation to follow up. My manager came to me and explained the error and used it as a learning moment for me. I realized that I had provide too much, which was the reason for all the last minute scrambling that we then had to endure."