Auditing

Three Auditors You Should Fire Now

The war for audit talent is very competitive. Finding, developing and retaining talented professionals can be very difficult. Oftentimes, bad auditors remain at organizations because managers are either too lazy or too afraid to develop or let go of slackers. If you are confused about what a slacker looks like, here are three types of auditors you should fire immediately.

Data Doesn’t Lie…But Your Analysis Technique Might

I remember working for one audit function that established a testing/sampling population of 25 for everything. If the actual population was 25,000 records, we tested 25. If the population was 1,000,000 records, we tested 25. Although fairly young in my career when I experienced this, my instinct told me this was wrong. After inquiring, I was told

It would be fun to Audit…

Several years ago while building a new relationship with an audit client, I mentioned that it would be ”fun to audit” Carnival’s cruise ship operations. She responded, ”Why, so you can catch them doing something wrong.” At this point, we had a candid conversation about her perception of internal auditing and what we really do. I explained that it is never our intention to “catch” someone doing something wrong. We are charged with evaluating processes to determine if risks have been identified and are appropriately managed via effective and efficient controls. Fortunately, this client was very open to learning about internal audit. We audited several of her areas with success. She would occasionally joke about our initial interaction by commenting that it would be “fun” to audit process a, b or c in our organization. Except her definition of “fun” was not really all that exciting. it was typically coworkers that were a pain in the but for her. Then one day she asked me, what was the

Audit Talent Management…Where will you find your next rock star?

Finding talented internal audit professionals seems to be a common problem plaguing audit functions regardless of country, industry and function maturity. Even in this down economy job websites are full of internal audit opportunities. I have spoken with colleagues who have received literally hundreds of applications for one job opening. However they have also commented that

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