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.
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