The US Department of Defense was not audited until six years ago, when it began a project to make their organization auditable. From the start, it was expected to take longer than six years:
You are looking at a potential new job. A large company wants you to lead a project on their audits. Here is the situation:
They are large and complex - on a different order of magnitude, possibly the largest, most complex organization in the world - with ~$4 trillion in assets (not market cap, but hard assets), and ~$900 billion annual budget, seven figures of employees, and operations spanning almost every activity, all over the world.
Such an organization is naturally divided into an incredibly large and complex org chart that maybe nobody really comprehends. Among all the entities on that chart are an incredible array of financial and asset tracking systems, computerized and manual, from new back to possibly WWII.
Your boss says that procurement is the most important thing to audit: An unusually large part of that $900 billion budget is the world's largest procurement budget and operation, with an endless list of vendors of every size and shape, from the world's largest companies - some whose core function is milking your organization without crossing legal redlines - to the tailor for West Point uniforms. And we were hoping you wouldn't ask, but we're afraid the budget and operation is decentralized across all/most of those entities in that org chart [edit: per commenter with actual knowledge, "the budget is somewhat centralized; it's just the execution that's decentralized".]
We'll need you to stitch all that together so we can audit it.
Who is providing executive support for this project? Well, very few in our organization, from the leadership down, really want it - they all see it as a distraction and source of trouble, possibly risk to their missions and careers. It was imposed on us. Also, the project will be the target of politics (including from a certain highly aggressive party in Congress), talking heads, and general public Internet attacks no matter what you do. Everyone sees you as a useful whipping post.
Do you take the job?