Internal Audit Best practices
The final audit report is the peak of the internal audit report. It is the certificate that internal auditors end up handing over to the company. The report is the most important aspect of an internal audit because it shows the audits findings, provides recommendations, and sums up the investigations
Best practice #1
It’s hard to embellish the importance of a good final audit report. However, internal auditors go towards the over inclusion of information, usually in an attempt to avoid leaving out suitable or important details or because of the time the audit took to uncover them. Doing this creates a bigger report than needed. All it does is bloat the report for your business and shareholders. A better practice is to make the internal audit report brief and short. Making a report focusing on information that backs up recommended changes and other conclusions. This helps steer stakeholders towards the outcome that will help their company, giving them guidance for improvement without making them go through extra information.
Best practice #2
Another best practice for internal audits is to never blindly take someone’s word for anything. Internal auditors should behave like detectives, verifying and validating statements given to them by employees and other workers within the business being audited. Which is why conducting interviews is important in shaping the auditor’s perception of the business area. Unverified statements must be taken with a grain of salt especially if there is no way of finding evidence to prove it. The speaker’s motives must always be examined carefully before a decision is made as to whether they are trustworthy or not.
Best practice #3
The third best practice is to always keep the goal of the audit in mind.Its paramount for internal auditors to keep focus on the goal of the process. All audits do not have the same goal, some focus on compliance measures, while others focus on business efficencey. Even within these general groupings different audits serve different objectives.Staying focused on the goal of your internal audit is one of the most rudimentary best practices in all of auditing. If you get distracted by extra info that is not within the scope of your internal audit to alleviate concerns of stakeholders, at the very least it will slow down your audit. If your audit never returns to the original goal of the audit, the final audit report will be useless to the company’s stakeholders.
Best practice #4
And Lastly the final best practice that is often overlooked is documenting the auditing process.whether your doing the operational audit, compliance audit, IT audit,or fraud audit. Documenting the auditing process may seem tediuos, but it is beneficial to those who do it. Auditors who take diligent notes of the process,the findings, and how the auditors move forward with those findings can find themselves with an extra source of strong support for their eventual conclusions and recommendations