Internal auditors are ethical, right? After all, we see ourselves as “beacons of ethical behavior,” shining a light on the misdeeds of others in our organizations. If you can’t trust the internal auditor, who can you trust? Yet, at the end of the day, we are also human. We are subject to the same pressures (culturally, politically, and organizationally) as everyone else in the enterprise. So, maybe we are vulnerable, after all.
But can we so complacent? I think not.
History is littered with instances in which the ethical compass of internal auditors appeared to fail, and rather spectacularly. The recent arrest and conviction of a public sector auditor in Uganda, for example, might be easily dismissed as an isolated transgression in a remote part of the world.…