The father of modern internal auditing, Larry Sawyer, once observed:
“Employee and management fraud is a poisonous weed that flourishes in a permissive climate where the seeds of fraud are helped and even invited to grow and mature.”
While Sawyer might have been a bit melodramatic in describing the risks related to fraud, there is no question that fraud risks have been around much longer than the internal audit profession itself. And, while the emphasis on fraud ebbs and flows, the risk of fraud itself never goes away.
There are many factors that influence the priorities of 21st century internal auditors.…