How to Handle a Bad Ass Auditor?

Before getting to the question "how to handle a bad ass auditor" it is useful to first understand what a bad ass auditor is.

So what a bad ass auditor is?

A bad ass auditor typically exhibits the following characteristics:

• He is close to the top man in the organization and his cotrerie and is more like a friend who will oblige, eventually.
• He is not really that competent in the subject matter but has this great (but unfortunately, totally false) impression going for him that "he is highly knowledgeable".
• His knowledge is very shallow and at times totally wrong. However, in case he is challenged he immediately and visibly gets very upset.
• He is very polished in his interactions but carries a jumbo-sized ego behind the facade of professionalism. When push comes to shove he shows his true colours.
• He shows that he is very principled and highly ethical but scratch the surface a little bit and the underlying layer which is dark and dirty comes out into the open.
• He has preconceived and cliched views on most of the concepts and doesn't deviate from them even when the situations would demand so.
• He is generally incompetent but adopts a formulaic approach to talk about things and to get things done and thus create the impression that he is not incompetent.

So how to handle such a bad ass auditor?

Here are some tricks that can be considered.

However, remember the bad ass auditor has a big, jumbo-sized ego.

So the exact trick for handling him will have be to gradually evolved through several hits and trials.

• Massage his ego, praise his knowledge and understanding of the formulaic things he speaks about, Some of those things will be completely incorrect and nonsensical but as long as he sticks to the formula it is perfectly fine.
• Confront him in case he speaks something totally incorrect on anything outside the formulaic things he generally talks about. Though that will hurt his ego, there is a possibility he will be careful when speaking about new things and stick to his formula. Such occasions also bring forth his incompetence but never highlight that too much.
• See if you can discuss about some of these aspects with the top man in the organization  and his coterie. This may as well back-fire because the bad ass auditor takes care to create great impression about himself with these folks. That's why he is bad ass and not only that the top man and his coterie in such organizations are also bad ass at some level. The simple corollary being, a bad ass will always like another!