Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Omer Tauqir
Grant Thornton
October 2011
Introduction
Why does IA need to be more efficient?
what does efficiency actually mean?
what does IA have to do:
at annual planning level
at individual assignment level
re-engineering resource allocation and quality review processes
Close
What to do
focus on what's really important to your customers (Audit Committee etc) and
what constitute important risks to organisation .
focus on outputs/outcomes
do more with less. cut out inefficient ways of
overall audit planning (including in-year updates)
individual assignment planning & delivery (i.e. thing outside the box)
resource planning, evidence gathering and quality assurance
. we are all guilty of it!
What to avoid
duplicate assurance/advice .
take on work we dont have skills to do.
How to do it
- annual internal audit planning and delivery
Approach.
Approach continued.
Be sceptical about repeat audit i.e. what is the rationale, what is the benefit,
who is asking for it?
test frequently with management and audit committee your emerging ideas
as develop your annual plan
critically evaluate whether IA has skills to deliver work effectively
undertake meaningful assessment of how outline audit work compares to
audit resource capacity and skills
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How to do it
- individual assignment planning and delivery
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Approach.
Keep in touch with sponsor. dont let them get in position where time and effort has to
be exerted to get them engaged again
similar to annual planning engage the sponsor of an audit in what they want out of it.
Practical ways of doing this include:
set out "top 5" questions that need to be answered
what is not included
outline nature of work to be undertaken and evidence gathering approaches
nature and type of required reporting. "One size does not fit all", be clear on required
reporting and why.
Once agreed, be robust to manage scope creep from sponsor and ourselves
Make effective use of sponsor role, make sure they understand and agree to their role to
"open doors" so that audit progresses without disruption
Plan the audit: Spend time on what information needs to be gathered and how
do we really need to undertake significant one to one interviews or will workshops,
remote surveys equally meet the need?
are we using available tools to make data analysis more meaningful, faster and more
appropriate for the purpose it is intending to deliver.
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Approach continued.
challenge any drift away from key areas of the scope document
keep asking the questions during the assignment delivery phase
have we got enough information to answer the questions (and if we believe
we do)? Have we sought the views of the sponsor?
have we really got behind the root causes and we are not focusing on
symptoms?
Reporting:
are we answering the scope questions/review areas in a transparent way?
they are not our working papers, we dont need to show the clients all the
work we have done (unless explicitly agreed for good reason)
is it appropriately pitched (in terms of content, style, layout, size of
document), particularly for senior stakeholders (lets face it, a significant
number do not read beyond the 2nd page)?
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How to do it
- re-engineering resource allocation and quality
review processes
Some thoughts.
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