Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson, the second part of our financial English series on discussing an audit.

Money is the language of business, and audits are one way companies prove they can be trusted with it. Audits check whether financial records are accurate and reliable. They help investors, managers, and the public see that the numbers tell the truth about the organization’s money.

If you’ve ever been a part of a discussion about an audit, you’ll know that there’s a lot of specialized language in the world of finance. And some of this language is what we call collocations, or natural combinations of words. We use collocations all the time. In fact, we store a collocation in our memory as one unit, rather than individual words.

Maybe you’ve noticed a few collocations I’ve already used. Earlier, I said “financial records,” which are the documents related to a company’s finances. I also said “to tell the truth,” which is a verb plus noun, showing that collocations include combinations of different types of words. And if you learn these combinations, you can both understand better and sound more fluent.

In today’s dialog, we’ll hear a conversation between Ray and Elaine, who work for an international company that has just gone through an audit. Ray is the CFO, or Chief Financial Officer, and Elaine is the CEO. In their conversation about the audit results, they use many collocations. We’ll explain these collocations later in the debrief.

Listening Questions

1. Ray says that the “audit findings” revealed a gap. What financial process is this gap related to?
2. What question does Elaine ask about reporting?
3. What does Ray suggest rolling out this quarter to improve procedures?

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