Anyone who knows our team, knows we all love the auditing profession. I believe this feeling come from two aspects - most auditors are naturally curious people, and we have a desire to make things work better. Continuous improvement is a core belief.
This mindset does not only apply to work with those we audit; it is also directed toward ourselves. Every year we get a minimum of 40 professional education credits to expand our knowledge and improve our skills. This helps us prepare for upcoming audit projects. We network with other jurisdictions (both during conferences and regular work time) to get their insights on audit topics and lessons learned. This helps us leverage experience from other audit shops to create better audits for Washington County.
We recently adopted our strategic plan that will help us with continuous improvement! We set key performance indicators to help us measure our performance and the quality of our work, because how can you get better without good data?!?! We document our policies and procedures and review them on a regular basis for needed updates. We look for ways to make our processes more efficient, such as implementing new audit software.
We hold ourselves to a high standard, because we are, and should be, a good example to the public and County departments of what a healthy, strong functioning organization should be.
Are we perfect? No. Are we always looking to get better? Yes! We are striving for excellence and not perfection. Is it easy? No! It is a lot of work, but it’s exactly the mindset we do, and should, have.
It is important that we support our continuous improvement philosophy not just with words, but also by our actions. We are constantly looking for better ways for our office and the County programs to serve the public, and it is an honor to work in this capacity.
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