What it means when your audit senior rarely gives review comments, and your manager always does
If your audit senior rarely gives review comments but your manager always has a long list of them, you're not imagining the pattern, and it doesn't mean your work is bad. Here's what's actually happening in that review chain, and what you can do about it.
Not Really a Review
Sara had been working with Jerome for three engagements now. Every time she submitted a section, the pattern was the same.
Jerome: Hey Sara, can you walk me through how you tested the revenue accruals?
Sara: Sure. I traced the year-end balance to the subsequent invoices, verified the cutoff dates against the shipping records, and...
Jerome: Okay, sounds good. Send it up to Ee Ling.
Rarely a written review comment. Rarely a tracked change. Rarely a "have you considered." Mostly a quick question, a quick initial, and the file sent up to the manager.
Two days later, Ee Ling, the manager, would come back with a long list of review points: additional cutoff testing was needed, a disclosure note didn't reconcile, and a sample size was too small. Sara would spend the next two evenings fixing what Jerome had apparently never noticed.
She'd started to dread the cycle. Not because the corrections were hard, but because she couldn't tell what she was doing wrong. If Jerome had a problem with her work, why didn't he ever say so? And if he didn't have a problem with it, why did Ee Ling always find so many?
She'd asked a colleague once, carefully, what Jerome was like as a senior. The answer was a shrug: "He's like most other seniors."
What Sara Might Not Know
Jerome was not being deliberately careless. Juggling his own sections alongside reviewing Sara's, a quick conversation felt sufficient in the moment. And there was always the next deadline pulling his attention elsewhere. Nothing had ever gone wrong badly enough to trace back to him, so there had never been a real reason for Jerome to do things differently. Jerome would ask Sara to walk him through the work, accept her explanation, and sign off the section. He didn't realise that listening to what juniors had done was not the same as properly examining the work itself.
What this cost everyone downstream was that issues that needed attention were reaching Ee Ling for the first time. Because there was little evidence of what Jerome had actually reviewed, Ee Ling had no clear way of knowing which parts of the file had already been checked. From where Ee Ling sat, the file arrived with significant matters not properly considered and documented.
Sara was left dealing with the consequences of the gap between Jerome's review (or lack thereof) and Ee Ling's expectations of the work.
Why This Feels So Personal
When a senior rarely gives review comments and a manager's list keeps growing, it's tempting to conclude the problem is your own competence. Some of it may genuinely be inexperience, and that's normal. This is precisely why SSA 220 requires close supervision and review of all juniors' work. Extensive manager comments often mean that the audit senior review layer never properly happened, not that you're a poor performer. Managers who've reviewed enough files know that when gaps in the junior's work are not fixed when the files reach them, it usually says more about the senior's review than the junior's work.
But Sara also needs to recognise what is and isn't within her control. She cannot make Jerome review her work properly. What she can do is make the review conversation more useful by clearly pointing out the areas she thinks need attention, explaining what she has done, and raising anything she is unsure about. That won't fix a weak review process, but it gives Sara a better way to protect the quality of her own work while making the gaps in the review more visible.
The Shift
It was Ee Ling's comments on the third engagement, more critical than usual, that made Sara try something different. Instead of waiting for Jerome to ask his usual two or three questions, she asked to walk him through the whole section herself, from start to finish, before sending anything up.
Sara: Before I submit this, can I take you through my testing? I want to make sure I'm not missing anything.
Jerome looked mildly surprised, but agreed. As Sara talked through her approach systematically, she caught herself mid-sentence while explaining the cutoff logic. Saying it out loud made her realise her cutoff date assumption didn't actually match what the client's shipping terms said. She corrected it immediately, before anyone else ever saw it.
Jerome, no longer asking a couple of routine questions just to fill the silence, started asking real ones, questions that came from actually engaging with the file instead of approving it without close attention. The conversation lasted half an hour. It was the first time Sara left a review conversation feeling that Jerome understood her file better than she'd assumed he did. Jerome seemed relieved too, perhaps because he finally had enough context to ask the questions that actually mattered.
What Changed After
The following week, Ee Ling had a question about the same accrual testing and, for the first time, asked it directly to Sara instead of routing it through Jerome. Sara answered it cleanly, from memory, because she'd already explained it once out loud to Jerome. Nothing dramatic happened after that. But Sara noticed something had changed. She found herself more confident in her own work.
What Happens If You Keep Compensating for the Weak Review
Two things quietly happen if this pattern goes unaddressed. The first is the obvious one: you end up doing the correction work twice, and over time, you may start wondering whether you can actually tell good work from bad because no one is giving you a clear indication of what you got right or wrong.
The second is easier to miss. If you start silently absorbing the manager's comments to spare your senior from having to engage with the work properly, you make the gap in the review process harder to see. You've solved your own short-term problem, but you've also hidden a gap in the review process that was never your responsibility to cover.
What You Can Do If You Were Sara
The first thing is to stop waiting to be asked, and offer the walkthrough instead: "Before I send this up, can I take you through what I found?" This isn't extra work invented to please a senior; it's the fastest way to catch your own mistakes before anyone else does, simply because explaining something out loud forces you to actually understand it.
The second is to notice what a walkthrough can build that a passive review never would. Learning to document your work clearly enough to explain it becomes a skill that will carry you far in your career. Being able to answer a manager's question confidently, because you've already thought it through and explained it once, is something people start to notice too. It will stand you in good stead when promotion decisions are being made.
The third, and most important, is to be honest about the limits of what you can fix. You can make the review conversation better. You cannot take responsibility for making sure your senior does the job properly. A proactive walkthrough is a genuine opportunity to improve the review, but it is not a substitute for proper review, and you should not feel responsible for compensating for the gap indefinitely.
If the pattern continues across several engagements, it may be worth escalating it directly and calmly to a manager, not as a complaint, but as a workflow question: "I want to make sure nothing's slipping through before it reaches you."
If moments like this feel familiar, Is It Them? (Part 1): Working With Your Audit Senior walks through more real situations just like this one, and what you can do differently next time.
Your Audit Mentor
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