February 2009

The great French military and political leader, Charles de Gaulle, is said to have observed that “generals are always fighting the last war.” The reasoning behind this often-used quote is that military threats are always changing and evolving, and there is a temptation to assume that the next threat will look just like the last one. My fear is that internal auditors are tempted to fall into this trap. However, focusing audit coverage on “yesterday’s risks” can result in being ill-prepared when new calamities appear.

In the late 1990s, the corporate sector became enamored with the “value-added” concept of measuring the worth of corporate functions.…

There was a time when a career goal for many internal audit professionals was to rise through the corporate internal audit ranks to become their company’s General Auditor – what is known as today’s Chief Audit Executive (CAE).  My first CAE had been an internal audit professional almost 20 years when I joined the organization.  He was still the CAE 13 years later when I took his place (having left and returned to the department twice).

Today’s CAE, however, is quite a different executive than in the past.  In the modern corporate model, the CAE position is frequently a rotational assignment that is filled for 3-5 year tenures by upwardly mobile executives out of the CFO organization. …