Unfortunately, accounting firms usually send junior accountants to do audits. So the junior accountant doesn't know that looking at sequence numbers with gaps isn't something to worry about. (like writing VOID on a check and throwing it away.) There are more effective ways to audit businesses than this type of thing. Unfortunately, it involves some domain knowledge of the business and experience.

Kelly - Could you give an example of what sort of table they are auditing for sequences? What is the auditor rationale for auditing a sequence?

thx

It's possible too, that you have cached say 100 sequence numbers in your CREATE SEQUENCE statement, and the instance is stopped before those cached numbers are used, discarded, and the sequence.nextval then becomes the next highest number ater what was last cached.

Business users should not be exposed to such information which has no business meaning. If such information is of business use then do not use sequences and generate it in such a manner devoid of any holes.

or even better if we can educate the auditors if it possible with other constraints in place.

And I thought I had it bad with government auditors.
If they are that interested in sequences, how do they feel about receipt and check numbers in a multi-user system!?

That's the problem with auditors.
You can tell users that they can have single user input and no gaps (not using sequences), or multi user input and gaps (using sequences). You don't care, you'll code it up which every way they want it.
Auditors don't care about office organization, they just don't want any gaps.

Assuming you have a good audit of your transactions that do take place, a written explanation by you of how sequences work, why they are used in this situation, and why there are gaps might satisfy them.

heh...you think you haveit bad?
We had to turn on as much db auditing as possible for our auditors.
Why?
They wanted to make sure that we didn't have someone in a back room somewhere typing in data manually as the auditors used the product.