Beyond Audit

CHAPTER 8Internal Audit Value

INTERNAL AUDIT DEPARTMENTS HAVE long been challenged to justify their existence. As was discussed in Chapter 3 regarding marketing the internal audit department, auditors have long been viewed as outsiders or the enemy. In reality, audit departments serve an unbelievably valuable role and provide an internal system of checks and balances to their business partners. For an exceptionally long time, internal audit departments have been trying to identify the most effective method to measure the quality or value of their product. How should audit measure quality? Should the quality metric be determined by the number of issues noted during an audit engagement? Or in the strength of the audit and business partner relationship? How about measuring quality based on the number of recommendations made or created business partner actions? There have even been suggestions that internal audit department measure the quality delivered based on an audit client survey. Hence, the higher the survey score, the better the level of quality delivered. This type of quality metric discussion has been going on for decades. The discussion around delivering quality and tracking that performance is still in development. In Chapter 9, the internal audit dashboard will be discussed along with specific metric suggestions and their corresponding performance criteria. But for this discussion, the focus will be on action plans, from the development, to the implementation, and ultimately ...