Resources and Prevent vs. Detection

  During an audit, it is crucial that you spend your time efficiently.  Without proper planning or thinking, you will be wasting the companies time and resource.  In this article (Revenue Errors), the Indiana Department of Revenue was audited because of two errors that lead to $526 million misplaced.  This error lead to three people losing their jobs.
  In the article it quotes the Gov. "Any that are found now are likely to be far smaller in amounts, but, you know, it doesn't matter how small - we'd like to debug everyone one of them,".  For the Gov. to have auditors find every last misplaced dollar is a huge waste of resources and time for the Govt and auditors.  Some of these dollars are low impact areas which means you should only spend a little time working on these.  After the auditors find the big mistakes, the govt should just have them work on something else.
  I would also like to address the issue of having prevention controls vs. having detection controls.  These errors were made because of miswritten software.  To me, miswritten just means that they didn't proofread the code enough times.  If they did a couple more proofreads, those three workers could have still had their job and the govt wouldn't have had to spend all this money trying to fix it.  Usually it is easier and more cost efficient to spend money on detection, but I feel in this case, it would have been easier to just spend money on more proofreaders.  Of course, even with all the proofreading in the world, an error could have occurred, but it would have been less likely to have happened.

Changing to Please People

Throughout the world, many companies run businesses that go against the law.  For many years, those companies seem to get away with bad business practices without a care in the world.  It is only until those bad practices are pointed out to the general public do the companies change.  Right now, Apple Inc. is in the process of changing the work ethics at their factories under Foxconn in China (Foxconn Audit).

After recent audits on Foxconn, due to reports of poor working conditions and a large amount of suicides, they started to change the way they treat their employees in China.  Apple has lowered the amount of hours employees work while increasing their wages to compensate for the hours lost.  Apple and Foxconn are working on improving the fairness to their employees in order to meet labor laws in China.

My question is, if the auditors never found anything wrong with Foxconn, would Apple and Foxconn have changed the way they treat their workers?  I think they wouldn't have changed anything about the way they operate.  As of now, the changes they will have to make to improve the labor treatment will have huge impacts on their net income!  Apple will either have to suffer a lower profit margin or they will have to increase the cost of their products which will decrease the amount of products sold.  Either way, their net income will go down. 

I feel  that the companies are only making changes because they feel like if they don't, they will come under huge criticism.  If Apple really cared about the unfairness to their employees, they would have been looking into it long ago and fixing the problem.  Instead they wait until someone shines light onto it to address the problem.  If people didn't care about the situation even with it in the news, then I doubt Apple would make any changes at all.