…It is the simplest question an auditor can ask. It is also the one that can undo even the most respected companies. The world built an answer two decades ago. Africa is only now waking up to it.
The auditor is young and entirely unmoved by reputation. She has spent a week inside one of Lagos’s most respected companies. This is a business with four decades behind it and a tax manager, Emeka, who has run its affairs for the better part of twenty years without ever being caught out. On the final afternoon she closes her laptop, looks across the table, and asks him one question. Walk me through how you know the tax figure in these accounts is correct. Not that it looks about right. How you know.
He starts to answer easily enough. Then something occurs that has never happened to him in two decades. He runs out of things to say. The number is correct, of that he has no doubt. Yet the whole of that certainty lives in his own head and in a spreadsheet only he can read. There is nothing on the table he can hand across that would prove it to anyone else.
Emeka is not incompetent. He is in truth very good. That is exactly what makes the silence so instructive. His difficulty is not that he lacks the answer. It is that his knowledge sits nowhere but in his own mind. It is governed by nothing and evidenced by nothing. So it is worth very little the moment he is asked to prove it. This is a failure of governance rather than expertise. It is one the corporate world has met before at ruinous cost.
