A short while ago, I was talking to an internal audit manager whom I had been helping with her audit of enterprise risk management at her company. Not surprisingly, her team found a great many issues. Communicating her opinion, that the risk management team and related activities were not seen Read More
We all know that internal auditors play a unique and complex role at the organizations where they work. They must serve many constituencies and customers, including the operating units they audit, the board and senior managers they report to, not to mention fellow employees, consumers, regulators, and citizens at large Read More
When you go to the doctor, do you want them to tell you what’s really wrong with you so that you can begin to treat the actual illness? Or are you content with that doctor only treating the symptoms, leaving the actual illness undiagnosed? Of course not. Well, issuing reportable Read More
Activision Blizzard, one of America’s largest video game developers, has received widespread criticism from several employees and a lawsuit in California for what some call a “frat boy” workplace culture. Now its CEO is promising a full review and series of initiatives to address the problems. Employees at the video Read More
In the current business environment, senior management is asking some internal audit functions to do more work that resembles quality assurance. There are several reasons for this, but generally those reasons fall under the heading of business process disruption in one form or another. These may be disruptions to the Read More
As more Americans receive vaccinations and the rate of COVID-19 cases steadily declines, more companies are planning for employees to return to their offices. Even as they do, work promises to look different than it did before many started working from their dining room tables and basements. Perhaps nowhere is Read More
May is Internal Audit Awareness Month. To celebrate the occasion, I am sharing my top five best practices for writing good internal audit reports. Internal audit reports are changing rapidly, from a stodgy, long and boring report that is partly there to serve as evidence that you conducted an audit, Read More
The recent hack of the Colonial Pipeline, which has crippled the transmission of fuel in the Southeast United States, serves as a stark and alarming reminder to all businesses of the vulnerability of information systems to security breaches, hacks, and ransomware attacks. Over the last several years, most businesses have Read More
When looking at most internal audit job postings, we generally see requirements of what a potential new internal audit hire should already know and less about the abilities they will need to succeed once they start the job. We all know from our own personal experience that a good job Read More
Soon after NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope into Earth’s orbit in 1990, scientists discovered, to their dismay, that the telescope’s primary mirror was flawed. The mirror, built to exacting specifications by an outside contractor, was ground 1/450 millimeters too flat, drastically reducing Hubble’s usefulness and the quality of its Read More
