CPA Maroa Julius Mwita Since history, most audits have concentrated on numbers since they form the main components in the financial statements and through the financial statements the financial health of a company is easily measured. This sounds a great idea but with the current trends where cyber security issues, climate related issues among other operational issues are knocking in from time to time, it’s a signal that modern audits should be much broader, risk-based, and include qualitative aspects. Writing an audit report off qualitative aspects is not feasible because in any audit mostly for external audits, the audit’s goal is to provide a “true and fair” view of an entity, and for internal audits is to provide assurance on various aspects ranging from internal controls, compliance, risk management, fraud which cannot be achieved solely through numerical data. Whereas quantitative data (numbers) shows what happened, qualitative aspects—such as management behavior, corporate structure, organizational system, control environments, and compliance culture—explain why it happened, providing the context necessary behind the numbers for stakeholders to make informed decisions. This means that when the condition is pointed out but the cause is silent then an organization may remain financially ill for long. Example The department XYZ had issued a total of Kshs. 5,400,000 as imprests for various purposes out of which only a total of Kshs. 2,100,000 had been accounted for leaving Kshs. 3,300,000 un accounted despite the lapse of the activity timelines. From these we can easily tell that the quantitative aspect (What) is clear but the qualitative (why) aspect has not been addressed and if this reported to management and finally to responsible committees like internal audit committee it will be hard to diagnose the problem faster since many aspects could contribute to the delay in accounting ranging from management culture of not to account, holding several imprests at a time, etc. It’s worth nothing that there are several