Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and Assurance Manager

>> So, my name's Madden Colgan. I am a manager with PricewaterhouseCoopers. I'm a licensed CPA in the state of Pennsylvania. So I'm a manager in the company's assurance practice. So the primary service that I provide is auditing services. So at a very high level you look at it this way. Companies prepare what we call financial statements. So more or less the financial statements give the company a picture of the financial health and the recent financial performance of the company. What we do is we come in; we give an independent and objective assessment of those financial statements. So at a very pure level, management puts those financial statements together. There may be the incentive for management to paint the financial statements or have them look a certain way. What we do as independent accountants is come in and assess the components of those financial statements at the end of the day to conclude whether or not they are free from [inaudible] misstatements. So fairly stated, pretty much when you think about it. The common example that I always give for what an auditor does is, if I were to sell you my car, right? I'd want to sell you my car. I'd want to get the best price for it. I'd say, you know, hey, the car runs great. It's never been in an accident. Wow. Which is accurate. You'd say, yeah. You know, I'm sure you'd want to say that, but you'd probably feel better if you took the car to your mechanic. And your mechanic, who's an expert in cars, took a look at it. And said yeah, runs great. Mileage is accurate. Never been in an accident. And I don't care if you buy it or not, I'm independent. I have no sense and nothing to gain if you buy it or don't. What I'm saying, in my expert opinion, is that everything this guy's telling you is factual. You'd probably feel more comfortable going to an independent source and have that independent source validate what I said. Theoretically that's what an auditor does. So with management it asserts that, you know, we have $250 million in cash. We go in and we validate that. We confirm that basically. If they say their revenues in the past year were $15 billion, we'll go and we'll get comfortable that that is actually an accurate statement. Also when you think about the accounting and financial reporting role and perspective that companies actually put together their financials. In that aspect, when you think about financial reporting, there's a lot of judgment that takes place there. Everything's not very cut and dry. Accounting is more of an art and not necessarily a science. So what we do is we also make sure that certain judgment calls that management is making are reasonable and that we would make similar calls as well.