Anyone for a humbug audit?
If there seems to be an awful lot of auditors around these days, it’s probably because there is an awful lot of auditing going on – and we don’t mean the old-fashioned tick-and-bash kind. John Morrish, writing in the Telegraph Magazine’s “Frantic semantics” column which looks at the origin and changing meanings of words, recently noted the growing use of the word “audit“, as in “skills audit“, “eco audit” or even “infestation audit“, allegedly used by the men from Rentokil. “All this we owe to the 1980s,” Morrish says, “when only accountants were considered capable of running anything, from the NHS to a hotdog stand. As they grew more powerful, so did their terminology.”
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