I just noticed that there are new financial audit forms in MLS 3.1. The MLS 3.1 release notes mentioned that there were new international audit forms for units outside the US/Canada, but there was no mention of the revamped audit forms for US/Canada.
Here are some of the changes to the forms that I noticed:
- The FHC audit is unchanged, but the Stake and Ward audits have been revamped.
- The Instruction section is greatly expanded with pictures and a deeper explanation of the organization, process, and in particular the particular responsibilities of each person involved in the process.
- For deposits and expenses that are tested for accuracy and completeness, the auditor is now required to fill out a worksheet that lists each item that was tested.
- We now are required to send in all of sections 2, 3, and 4, which means that we are sending 7 pages instead of 2, so even if we send it on double-sided copies, that means 4 sheets of paper per unit instead of 1.
That last point is interesting because I know that a few years ago the Church Auditing Department made a particular issue of telling us
not to include any extra pieces of paper in the forms we submitted. The person we were talking to said something along the lines of: "Do you know how many extra thousands of pages we would have to file if each unit of the Church gave us just
one extra sheet of paper on each audit?" But now we are quadrupling the number of pages we send in to the auditing department.
