I used to manage the organizational credit card for a small Pentagon group (150 folks). About every three months, the audit folks would call up and want to talk about a purchase. It would take me about 90 minutes to dig out the paperwork, research the facts, and then I’d have to write a three page explanation over the purchase. For items costing $5k to $100k...it made sense.
One day, they called me up and identified a special screwdriver kit which cost $8, which we had purchased. I went back....researched the whole thing. We had actually avoided GSA and normal path....using just the local hardware shop, and I could even show the homework done....we saved around $3 over the GSA pricing. So then I got around to the paperwork involved and the report. There was probably $100 of man-hours involved....over an audit of a $8 screwdriver kit. I felt silly but at least it proved that audits work the way they are supposed.
A decade ago, I had a conversation with a contractor who led a bid deal for his company that was worth around $100 million a year. The government contract specified that they had have x-number of employees to provide x-work. No problem. Then it specified that they had to have three PhD professor-types. My contractor questioned this and bluntly told the government guy that this was a total waste of manpower for what they were doing. On top of that...each of the PhD guys had to have a secretary, and private office space. It was a total waste but the government guy mandated this. After winning the bid, then came the problem of trying to hire the PhD guys. One of them wanted the company to privately ship his horse from west coast to this site in Virginia.
And the audits should include that kind of nonsense not just the accounting aspects.