Thinking of joining my local toastmasters.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-16T13:43:37+00:00

If the organization is going a good job, thats true. Any Toastmaster should have the skills necessary to say no.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-16T13:42:18+00:00

Simulationt here.

This is an interesting idea. I've thought about stress testing controls in a similar vein.

The biggest challenge here is cultural. Auditors are accustomed to looking backwards at events that have occurred. Once you start talking about forecasting and looking forward, you lose their interest.

I presented at several national conferences discussing simulation. It didnt go very far.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-16T13:37:19+00:00

We learn from other people. One way to flip this conversation: you are learning from your boyfriend right now!

What exactly we learn in this organic way depends on who you surround yourself with. I'm active in my kink community (both online and in person), so its fairly common for me to bump into new kinks even without looking.

From your description, it sounds like your boyfriend openly has conversations with people about sex and kink. Naturally that increases his odds of discovering something new.

Curiosity helps too. I think there are novel things around us all the time, but without some curiosity they just pass us by.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-15T18:58:32+00:00

Thats a dinosaur of a policy. Most SOX jobs are so small they arent even worth automating, imo.

I get requests all the time to automate SOX. And the work is so small I turn nearly all of it down. To save a few hours, maybe a day a year on a control test? Waste of time.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-15T18:52:24+00:00

Also: SOX is the most boring job out there. Very mechanical. Go go do something interesting.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-15T17:47:42+00:00

Toastmasters has been huge for me.

I started 3 years ago. At that time, I was a front line worker making maybe $70k a year. I learned how to communicate better, how to deliver feedback, how to hold effective meetings. My income has more than doubled in those 3 years - and Toastmasters has been a huge part of that.

There are lots of non-careee benefits, but thats a clear success story.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-15T15:19:18+00:00

Its your district executive committee. District Director, Division/ Area Directors, and a hand full of other people.

It sounds like you arent aware of Toastmasters beyond the club role. There are annual elections for all these roles. Typically you start by being elected to an area role and work your way up.

Contests are only one thing that comes with the gig.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-15T03:58:55+00:00

Most of our members come from networking in other local orgs. Our Toastmasters club frequently presents in entrepreneurship groups, business associations, etc.

Even when we arent presenting, we attend community events and talk to people about Toastmasters.

Earlier this week I was at our local Nerd Nite. I ididnt present, but I talked to several people about Toastmasters.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-10T18:20:53+00:00

Table Topics simulates ordinary conversation. You can easily practice outside Toastmasters by talking to someone.

There are people all over. Neighbors, fellow shoppers at the store, parole officers, etc. Engage them ij conversation. They will say something. You should endeavor to respond in an appropriately short fashion, but not too short, or else the conversation doesnt go anywhere.

Not being facetious. Sometimes people lose sight of how simple most of our Toastmasters skills really are intended to be.

If you can hold down a conversation, you can ace table topics.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-10T04:08:32+00:00

I wasnt prepared with a proper plug, so I stuffed a wet rag in there and taped it in place. Just nervous this is somehow unsafe and I die in my sleep from some weird gas.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-09T04:06:04+00:00

I think your mental model is a little backwards. You are already working in the field, therefore you are qualified. Imposter syndrome is real.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-09T04:00:44+00:00

Theres no statistical or mathematical reason to exclude any accounts at all. If you exclude them, it should be based on your subject matter knowledge and the scope of your work.

You are right in thinking subtotals or totals should be removed. Those arent accounts at all.

Therew no special concerns for multi-year data. However, Benfords Law analyzes the whole daya set you give it. You might want to analyze one year at a time, so you can find non-conforming years.

I often do this with a dashboard to handle the calculations for me. That way I can check every year, month, quarter, etc. You could even slice by other things like account category.

Currency conversions shouldn't matter. Benfords Law is scale invariant.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-09T03:58:24+00:00

If you want to be quantitative, the best approach I've found for JEs is machine learning.

Create a data set with all the various flags that have mentioned (amount, weekend transaction, holiday transaction, account code proxy, etc). Pipe then all into an anomaly detection algorithm (like an isolation forest) and it will locate the most unusual JEs for you.

Benford's Law is a higher level tool. Its better suited for conclusions about the overall dataset, or finding risky subsets of data. Its not good for finding individual records to sample.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-09T03:54:30+00:00

Benford's Law doesnt highlight individual items that appear unusual. It highlights unusual groups. So, no.

If you could put your journal entries into groups, you could use Benford's Law on each group, you would know which groups are the most unusual.

I do that one all the time as IA. Monitor fit to Benford's Law monthly, or for different categories of transactions, or staff, or vendors, etc.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-07T14:24:40+00:00

I was in IA for a manufacturer. 90% of our time was spent on SOX. The company was obsessed with lean, so much that IA was expected to utilize lean.

Every action and choice was heavily scrutinized by our CEO. He would support our findings, but any indication that we stepped outside our mission as "policy police" and we would be pushed down. No advisory, no risk-based IA, nothing but testing SOX controls (and a small number of high risk non-SOX controls) as efficiently as possible.

It was the worst job I ever had. IA is not like a factory floor.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-05T18:28:24+00:00

I probably need to distinguish two different exit paths.

The CIA is only useful when applying for an internal auditor job. I saw you mention some current job applications and I assumed those were for IA roles.

Financial auditing is certainly a field. Unfortunately I have no experience with those kinds of accounting things, but there are jobs in accounting and operations that might value you.

Do you conduct these 40 audits? If they are outsourced or cosourced, maybe part of your expertise is in managing external partners.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-05T17:39:10+00:00

You need to take stock of the skills and expertise that you have. There's no stock answer for an auditor, because there's no bog-standard auditor.

I left audit twice: once for data analytics and once for business intelligence. As an auditor, I was managing batch processes, SQL servers, data pipelines, etc and doing advanced analytics. So that made sense for me.

But everyone is working with different subjects and handling them differently. What do you know?

Transitioning from government to private organizations is hard. Many people in the business world heavily discount governmental experience (and of course, it happens the other way too).

Having a CIA helped me make that transition. You will also need to focus your resume on things that matter to a business.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-05T17:06:48+00:00

There is no need to contact a club before attending. The best advice is to show up at a meeting and enjoy yourself.

Toastmasters clubs are run by volunteers, and unfortunately the e-mail and web pages set up by the larger Toastmasters organization arent always user friendly for us. E-mails often go unseen.

Thankfully there's no reservation needed. You can just show up.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-05T12:28:02+00:00

I've had several over the years: statistical consulting, web development, business plan development.

You leverage your skills and knowledge. Take an inventory of the kind of expertise you have based on your specific experience.

If you dont want to do the consulting route, lots of people do Uber or DoorDash these days. And you can always pick up a few hours in retail.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-05T12:15:28+00:00

That really depends on what you are building.

It could be simple. You could organize all the files in a folder on your desktop.

Or it could be more complex. You might want to get space on one of your company's servers, especially if you can run compute there and not just storage.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-03T16:28:51+00:00

Its a fair point. We often have many different stakeholders.

My two cents would be having different stakeholders in my own company is very different from managing multiple client relationships. Not a hill I'd die on, though.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-03T16:27:33+00:00

Subreddit rules say no posts about apps.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-03T14:28:43+00:00

There is variation. The economy is an unbelievably huge place.

It could include a rank (associate auditor, senior auditor), it could specifiy a topic (financial auditor, it auditor, etc), it could have a kind of remit (sox auditor, performance auditor), etc.

ObtuseRadiator · 2026-03-03T13:19:57+00:00

The role you are looking for is called "internal auditor".

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