Hamilton Wong Case

1. If I were in Hamilton Wong’s position, I would feel compelled to report every single one of my hours worked on the Willie & Loman audit. The practice of underreporting your hours or “eating time” as Wong called it, is highly unethical and can lead to many future problems in the workplace. Although it is something that commonly takes place, that does not mean it is any less unethical to do. The problems that you run into by doing this mostly involve future audits. The first problem is not being able to bill the client correctly, as they are paying much less than the work that they actually received from the firm. It effects future audits because if you report that it took so many less hours than expected, this will be expected of your team in the future. Management will only budget the time that you reported for the next audit, making each subsequent audit harder and harder to complete within the budget given. This will only hurt you and your whole audit team in the future, so Hutchinson or Wong should not do it no matter what promotion is at stake. I believe that Hutchinson did behave unethically by underreporting her hours worked on the engagement so severely. Although she has made the situation better for herself by looking like the all star of the team, she has only hurt the team for future audits when they will keep receiving low budget times for audits. This is a very selfish decision that Hutchinson has made, making it highly unethical.
2. The key objectives of tracking hours worked by individual accounts or assignments on an audit engagement is to bill their clients on the work that has been done. This is done by keeping accurate record of the time worked on each account and the engagement as a whole. This also helps budget time for future audits based on the amount of time that it took in previous years. This is of great help to management at the accounting firm planning the audit. The underreporting of time has many implications for individual