Close to "There's No Backing Out Now!!"

This past Thursday we spent the day at Church headquarters being introduced to our new assignment and being trained by Dan Dahlgren of the Auditing Department. We have now a little better idea of what we are supposed to be doing when we get to Africa. In my experience what you are supposed to do and what you actually do are sometimes different. We enter the "real world" when we start training with Elder and Sister Stringham, who are couple that we are replacing. They will be able to fill us in on what they've been doing, what they wish they had time to do and what "opportunities" are before us.

The day with Dan Dahlgren was quite informative and certainly gave us a much better idea of the how the sacred funds of the Church are safeguarded and more importantly the procedures in place to protect those who handle Church funds. Our key role will be to train Stake Presidents and Stake Auditing Committees in Church procedures. Unless it is a rare circumstance we will not actually be performing any audits ourselves. We do receive the completed audits which are done in every unit twice per year and enter the results into a Church data base. We then review the audits and check them against procedures and compare them to previous audits in order to determine where procedures are not being followed and more training is required. This forensic and defalcation work hopefully rarely detects dishonesty. More on this later.