Australian professionals feature as finalists in global Audit Awards
Two Aussies will be going head-to-head as finalists in the year’s global Audit Awards hosted by global data platform DataSnipper, with a trip to its next international conference on the table.
Warwick Spargo, a partner at RSM in Melbourne, and Coffs Harbour-based Crowe senior manager Natasha House will compete as two of the three global finalists in the ‘MVP of the Year’ category, while Jesika Ghale is a ‘Newcomer’ finalist.
Established in Amsterdam almost a decade ago, DataSnipper is an intelligent automation tool used by audit and finance professionals within Excel to streamline workflows and extract and verify data, with the unicorn claiming over 600,000 active users worldwide.
An Australia-based auditor has yet to win one of its three global annual awards since their inauguration in 2023, albeit Mary Ann Mantes, who works for Moore out of Manila, took home the ‘MVP of the Year’ prize in 2024, while Melbourne-based HLB Mann Judd manager Nazarena Comperatore was a ‘Hero of the Year’ finalist in the same year.
Jury members for this year’s awards include Martin Moeller, Microsoft’s head of AI & agentic for financial services, and Protiviti global technology audit & advisory leader David Lehmann, while winners will receive an ‘exclusive invitation’ to DataSnipper’s next international ‘Connect’ conference in New York – where the finalists have already been up in lights in Times Square.
“The people who keep audit and finance running don’t usually get a spotlight, so we gave them the biggest one we could find,” the company said. “Audit and finance is full of professionals who raise the bar quietly, who transform how their firm’s work, who bring colleagues along with them, and who lead when no one asked them to. The Audit Awards exist for exactly those people.”
As to this year’s Australian representation, Spargo has been with RSM for more than two and a half decades, having prior to that spent more than a decade with the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office, while House joined Findex in 2012. Meanwhile, Jesika Ghale is a graduate auditor with Brisbane-based boutique Independent Audit Services, having completed her accounting degree last year.
