Over time, internal auditors tend to hear about a lot of things that went wrong. Unfortunately, it’s not just our clients who make mistakes — I have witnessed more than a few spectacular internal audit failures, and in too many cases the internal audits went wrong for reasons that easily could have been prevented during engagement planning. Some of the biggest blunders often seem to stem from the same few mistakes. In the hope that we can learn from each other’s mistakes, I have listed below my take on the most common of these missteps.
- Not setting aside enough time to adequately plan the audit.