Question: I was reviewing a bit and ran into a bad answer. Usually I open the question to see it within context (I know this is not the supposed course of action) and so I did.  

The bad answer I was reviewing wasn't there anymore, it apparently had been deleted. I went back to the review page and tried to edit the answer to make sure it was deleted, and I got a blank page saying it was a deleted post.

In view of all this I clicked 'no action needed' as no action was needed.

And I got the following message:

> 
> STOP! Look and Listen.
> 
> 
> This was an audit, designed to see if you were paying attention. You didn't pass. This post was of very poor quality, and needed significant improvements to be useful – passing over such posts hurts the ability of others to find and answer good questions. Please try to fix such posts by editing, downvoting, closing, or flagging as "very low quality".
> 
> 
> Don't worry, we've already handled this post appropriately – but please take a minute to look it over closely, keeping in mind the guidance above.
> 
> 
> 

Am I incurring any sort of penalty with what just happened? In my opinion I reviewed correctly. No action was needed.

I find this a bit offensive, to be honest. I am reasonably careful while reviewing and most of my reviews are actually 'skip'.

Answer: 
The only consequences of failed audits can be a temporary and short-lived review ban if this happens multiple times within a short duration. Even if this does happen, you can still vote to close questions you find elsewhere.

As you have just noticed, the system isn't perfect hence why the penalty is so small. It's just to prevent people from mindlessly racing through the audits to get a badge.

It's really nothing to worry about and it happens to lots of people all the time for various reasons.
I have seen one such test edit. It was so obvious to reject it. May be they can one day train their SW to send less and less obviously bad edits? May be the software can eventually do good edits? [When that happens!](http://xkcd.com/810/)