The statutory audit

A sign on a German office door reads Revision, and an English reader expects a room where drafts are corrected, or perhaps where students cram before an exam. Neither is behind it. On a German organisation chart die Interne Revision is internal audit: the department that checks, on the board’s behalf, whether the firm’s own procedures and controls actually work. Both languages took the word from Latin revidere, to look at again, so the two are related; what differs is the job. English « revision » usually names the changed version, German Revision in a company names the people doing the looking. Revising for an exam is simply lernen, and a revised draft is normally die überarbeitete Fassung. One step further, the word stops fitting even in German: the audit of the annual accounts by an outside firm is called die Abschlussprüfung in German law, not Revision, although in Switzerland the statutory auditor is still called die Revisionsstelle.