Seeking Out Financial Mistakes

11:33, May 7, 2021

Students from the Graduate School of Economics and Management (GSEM) solved a business case with assistance from Deloitte CIS specialists.

Anton Kochetkov, Head of Deloitte’s Yekaterinburg office, Elena Malygina, Audit Manager, and Yulia Aprelskaya, Senior Administrative Specialist, talked to final year International Economics and Business students about the basics of auditing and presented a live tutorial of what an auditor does based on a real business case.

Third and Fourth year International Economics and Business students worked in teams to analyse information, find errors in financial statements and present a reasoned position for their corrections.

After several hours of hard work and presentations of all the teams’ solutions, Deloitte experts revealed the mistakes identified during the real audit and explained how they corrected them. The students were therefore able to compare their ideas with the solutions of real auditors, giving them an understanding of which details and aspects they should look at more closely next time.

The winners of the Deloitte CIS business case competition were Kristina Artemyeva, Nikita Eroshkin, Lilit Danielyan and Polina Malakhova from team «Survivors».

Kristina Artemyeva, a fourth year IEB student, shared her impressions:

The event was really interesting and informative. Experts from Deloitte first spoke about the main audit analysis procedures, and then provided a case study for analysing and identifying inaccuracies and errors in the financial statements of a retail company. At first glance, the task did not seem so difficult, but as soon as we received the handout consisting of "thousands" of papers, it immediately became clear how wrong we were. We thought of the team name – Survivors – instantly. We started storming through all these papers and sharing our ideas, gradually forming a list of errors found in the retail chain's statements. We then spoke to the experts about everything we found and possible ways of correcting it.

All participants who successfully completed the task received personal invitations for Deloitte’s One Day Offer, giving them the chance to skip the first few stages of the selection process for entry-level positions in the audit department.

The International Economics and Business programme has formed close ties with business to help students acquire practical skills across four professional disciplines (auditor, business analyst, international trade specialist and investment analyst) and prepare them for successful careers in international and local companies of their choice.