August 2012

I have written frequently over the past three years about the refocusing of internal auditing’s priorities around the world. The era of extensive focus on the effectiveness of financial controls is a thing of the past for most internal audit departments. Instead, annual internal audit programs in 2012 are apt to be more equally divided between operational risks, financial risks, and compliance risks. Emphasis on IT and fraud risks also has increased since 2008.

With internal auditing’s focus having been transformed, it is only natural that the requisite skills needed by internal auditors would have changed, as well. The recently published Global Pulse of the Internal Audit Profession survey results by The IIA’s Audit Executive Center confirmed very dramatically how much the requisite skills for internal auditors have changed.…

I have written extensively over the years of the need to improve the timeliness of internal audit results. Nothing undermines the value of an internal audit more than delivering the results when it is too late for management to correct a problem or too late to avoid further fraud, waste, or mismanagement.

​If lengthy untimely audits are one extreme, the other is what I call “drive-by” internal audits. These are so-called internal audits in which either canned internal audit programs or checklists are used to facilitate a quick audit or report. In the financial services and retail industries, branch or store audits are sometimes conducted in this manner.…