Tales from the audit trenches #4: We will call you Cossack John…

When time permits, I have decided to share some of what I consider to be the slightly more amusing or interesting experiences from my time in the wonderful profession that is internal audit.?

Some of you may recognise some of these stories. I have shared several them previously in person. All are true. Maybe I have changed some of the names of those involved. Maybe not.????I have considered our Code of Ethics and have sought to abide by the confidentiality rule and principles throughout. As you would expect. Of course…

Welcome to the fourth article, or episode if you prefer of… ***gentle fanfare and drum roll*** …tales from the internal audit trenches.

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The tales I have previously shared have been ones drawn from the earlier stages in my internal audit journey. I was going to type career, but that word always makes me smile as I don’t think of having had a career as such. More a series of accidents, decisions, good and bad choices and a lot of good fortune thrown into the mix. I never think of it as a career. And career sounds a bit too grown up, of course.

This tale comes from later in my internal audit journey.

I have just returned from a work trip to Kyiv, Ukraine, following my first in-person visit since February 2020. Between then and this visit, like many of us, I have continued to remotely work with my colleagues there. This has helped keep relationships going and - I think - boost their capability through further learning and development.

But things in Ukraine have taken a turn for the worse in recent months as we are sadly seeing in the media on a daily basis at the moment.

So, I’ve been thinking about Ukraine a fair bit lately and on my flight back, I typed up this little tale.

I hope you enjoy it.

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I started work with the Ukrainian Defence Internal Audit team in March 2016, when I was invited over by the UK colleagues to deliver some training to them. They had heard of similar work that I had undertaken in Georgia in 2015 with the Defence Internal Audit team there, after I had been recommended by contacts in the UK MOD.

See, a series of lucky breaks.

?Certainly not a career.

?The initial training delivery in Ukraine was hard work.

?They were a tough, largely stony and expressionless military audience (most were serving officers). The training was delivered through interpreters. This made it slightly trickier to establish rapport. Furthermore, we also know how much jargon and how many peculiar words, we as internal auditors regularly use! We can’t even agree what our USP of assurance means between ourselves, let alone try to accurately convey that through interpreters and into another language. And that’s before we think of risk appetite, risk tolerance, risk capacity et al. (While I’m on the subject, it reminded me of another set of projects I’d worked on previously in northern Iraq over 2007-2010, where there was no word for governance in the Kurdish language).

As I was talking, I could get little sense of whether the delegates were thinking I was a complete idiot, or whether they liked what I was saying and whether it was interesting and useful for them. As I say, they were a hard audience.

But as the first week wore on, I felt happier and there were some good discussions and increasing amounts of delegate interaction. By the end of week two, we were all much more comfortable with each other and trust and confidence in me and my work was growing. I’d done it.

And I was warmly invited back, which is always a good sign.

Over the years this has developed into an ongoing programme of cooperation, involving further training delivery, consultancy, advice, support and an external quality assessment against the IPPF, which was (and I think is) the very first one conducted in the public sector in Ukraine. Some of the work I contributed to has even been adopted by the Ministry of Finance into a revised Internal Audit Law (everything needs a law here) for the whole of the public sector in Ukraine. Cool.

There have also been a number of very pleasant evenings out to the ballet, cinema, restaurants and the occasional bar in Kyiv. It’s a big city, with some very beautiful parts and some very, dare I say it, old-school Soviet construction too in places. But I like its crunchiness.

It was at one of these evenings out in January 2017 when I was invited the next morning to go ‘ice-hole swimming’ by the Defence Internal Audit team’s Deputy Director.

“We will collect you tomorrow at 0700”.

“Ice-hole what”, I replied?

“Ice-hole swimming”, he replied. “We always do it on the Orthodox Epiphany”.

And he was right, of course.

The Orthodox Epiphany celebrates the baptism, and diving into an ice-hole on this day helps believers wash away their sins and also benefit from the healing effect of water on this special day. If you dive into an ice-hole, you won’t be sick or ill for the whole year.

Apparently.

The only real challenge of course is that the Orthodox Epiphany is in January each year.

And when he asked me, it was minus-15 degrees outside, with snow and ice everywhere, of course.

I also googled ‘ice-hole swimming’ and quickly found out that while it may be a tad refreshing, invigorating even, people sometimes die from doing it.

That helped me make up my mind, not that I really needed much further encouragement.

“Thanks, but no thanks, Sergei” I replied.

He tried harder to persuade me, but I was having absolutely none of it. For about an hour I survived all forms of persuasion, short of thumbscrews and water-boarding.

“Well, come and watch us do it then” he finally offered.

“Thank you, but no, Sergei” I replied again. I knew that if they got me there, they would most likely trap me, pick me up and dunk me anyway. Many of them were big and burly.

And I’m not.

So, being the cowardly, weak English internal auditor, I didn’t want to be anywhere near this high-risk, dangerous and crazy form of pseudo-torture.

But after further cajoling I eventually relented. I would go to watch. But that was it.

We were driven out of Kyiv to a nearby military sports facility (that looked a little like I imagine a CIA black site to look like) and seven or eight of them took the plunge in their speedos (yes, speedos), following a chilly walk down to the river (the mighty Dnieper!) through the snow, dressed only in aforementioned speedos and flimsy white dressing gowns.

In the minus-15 temperature.

They did it.

Respect to them.

They also simply didn’t dip a toe in and leap out squealing. It was three complete dunks under water. With no squealing.

And they didn’t throw me in.

Maybe a new idea for internal audit team-building events?!?

But afterwards, Sergei insisted on one thing.

“Next time, you must do it too, John”, he said.

I demurred. “Not really my thing, Sergei”.

“If you do it, we will call you Cossack John. You will be a Cossack like us”

I hesitated.

“Cossack John?”

“Yes, you will be Cossack John”.

Now, Sergei must be an excellent judge of character, as he must have known that this would appeal to me. Cossack John sounded a hard nick-name, one worthy of respect and it would be kinda cool to have these tough Ukrainian military colleagues thinking of me as some form of crazy-ass-blood-brother-Cossack-hero like them.

Slight historical interlude: In the 15th century a new martial society - the Cossacks (from the Turkic Kazak, meaning “adventurer” or “free man”) - was beginning to evolve in Ukraine’s southern steppe frontier. The term was applied initially to adventurers who entered the steppe seasonally for hunting, fishing, and the gathering of honey. Their numbers were continually augmented by peasants fleeing serfdom and adventurers from other social strata, including the nobility. Banding together for mutual protection, by the mid-16th century the Cossacks had developed a military organisation of a peculiarly democratic kind, with a general assembly (rada) as the supreme authority and elected officers, including the commander in chief, or hetman. Their centre was the Sich, an armed camp in the lands of the lower Dnieper.

Cossacks were cool.

Arguably super-cool, if you like that sort of thing.

As a student of military history, I do.

Coming back to Sergei and the tale.

He had trapped me.

So, of course I said, “yes, next time that I am over and it is Epiphany, I’ll do it. I promise”.

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I broke my promise in January 2018.

I was there at Epiphany in Kyiv. But I bottled it. I didn’t go. My excuse? It was minus-20 this year.

I wasn’t there in January 2019 or January 2020. How convenient. Then the pandemic intervened last year.

But they still remembered my promise to them and their promise to call me Cossack John.

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My visit this last week coincided with Epiphany and I was ready.

I awaited the call from Sergei.

I would forever be Cossack John!

The call didn’t come and so no ice-hole swimming or super-cool nickname for me!

I spoke with Sergei later on January 19, Epiphany, and found out that he was unwell, so he didn’t go this year. Perhaps he didn’t go for his own ice-hole dunk last year, and so fell victim to sickness. I didn’t ask.

“Sergei, I was ready,” I said.

“I am sorry, John, very sorry” he replied.

He continued.

“But you know that we have already been calling you Cossack John for the last three years. You are, and will always be, Cossack John to all of us!”

So, I have my cool nickname amongst the c180 members of the Ukrainian Defence Internal Audit team and I didn’t even have to endure the ice-plunge to get it. Even better.

Cossack John it is then!

And of course, I have been called far worse things during my internal audit not-a-career.

I have also been called many other things doing my internal audit job.

But Cossack John is my favourite. By a mile.

It makes me happy, like this fellow Cossack:

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I hope you enjoyed this fourth tale from the internal audit trenches.

But speaking of trenches…and being a little more serious for a minute.

In eastern Ukraine, the trenches are very real at the moment. And pretty chilly at this time of year.

The Ukrainian armed forces are there and are ready to defend their country if needed from further incursion or invasion, minor or major. Whatever the politicians call it.

And do remember that nearly 14000 Ukrainians have already died since the 2014 invasion, a quarter of them civilians.

On 4 November 2019, it was a great honour for me to be invited to join several of my Ukrainian Defence Internal Audit team colleagues and a group of recent conscripts at a memorial to military personnel killed since this invasion.

Each day a different unit from the armed forces is invited to lay flowers of remembrance following a short service (in the building behind us in the photograph below) in which the names of those killed on that day are solemnly read out. On the day I attended, twelve names were read out.

On some days there are over 200 names.

The Ukrainian Defence Internal Audit team support the armed forces through increasingly effective, risk-based internal audit engagements that help ensure greater operational readiness and better supporting systems, processes and activities.

And I’m proud to have worked with the Ukrainian Defence Internal Audit team over these five years.

I hope that my friends there stay well and stay safe. And I hope for a speedy and peaceful resolution to the current challenging geo-political situation.

Cossack John