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Tag Archives: Internal Audit Effectiveness

2019 ECIIA Conference – Plenary presentation

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Does internal audit have a blind spot concerning organizational politics?

I was pleased to be asked to present at the 2019 ECIIA conference in Luxembourg. It was an honour and a privilege to present to around 700 attendees. The key messages I delivered were:

  1. We (in internal audit) may not be doing enough to proactively identify and manage political pressure:
    • First at the level of (audit) teams, but also at the level of the IIA itself; and
  2. The wrong sort of politics may even be a problem within the Internal Audit profession

I defined organizational politics as:

  • The networking, influencing approaches, and use power that managers deploy to get the organization to make a decision they want, and/or
  • The strategies and tactics managers use to slow down decision making, or even to stop decisions being made..

Organizational politics can be seen in a good or bad light, depending on whether the political activity is genuinely for an organizational benefit, compared to primarily benefiting an individual’s career, power and/or influence.

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IAS Conference 2018 – Internal Audit: Embracing the challenges of the future

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I am looking forward to chairing the IAS Conference 2018 – Internal Audit: Embracing the challenges of the future taking place in November 2018.

The Internal Audit Service will hold its annual international conference on 6 November 2018. The Conference will focus on the global challenges affecting the Internal Audit (IA) profession and will be opened by the First Vice-President of the European Commission, Mr Frans Timmermans. In addition, Mr Richard Chambers, President and CEO of IIA Global will be a keynote speaker.

Full details about the conference can be found here, including registration options. The conference will also be live streamed.

When: 
Tuesday 6 November 2018, 8.00 – 18.00 (CET)
Where:
Alcide De Gasperi Room, Charlemagne Building
170, Rue de la Loi
1000 Brussels

Belgium

 

Chairing the EU Audit conference on Creativity & Innovation in Internal Auditing

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I was very pleased to be involved with a team from the European Union Internal Audit Service to chair their 1 day workshop on Creativity & Innovation in Internal Auditing in October 2017.

James Paterson

The agenda was packed with interesting topics and great speakers. The main themes were:

  • The history of Accounting and Auditing – with insights into what might happen in the future
  • The impact of technology on business and internal audit – we covered; A, B, C, D: AI, BlockChain, Cyber and Data but surprisingly it emphasised the importance of not thinking technology should be even the main focus
  • Auditing Culture and Auditing behaviour – emphasising the importance of looking at these areas
  • Lean auditing and agile ways of working (which I also participated in) – highlighting that Value and Productivity needed to be an essential area of focus for Internal Audit teams going forward.

Slides are available through the following link:

https://ec.europa.eu/info/events/internal-audit-service-conference-2017-2017-oct-05_en

The conference web stream is available through this link:
https://webcast.ec.europa.eu/internal-audit-service-conference-2017

Hope some of this material is of interest.

IIA UK Leaders Conference – Discussion On Independence

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Chaired a very interesting panel discussion on internal audit independence for the IIA UK Leaders Conference in London in March 2017.

I have written up the key points in an article that includes some great advice, but also looks at the real world challenges and dilemmas that internal auditors face to balance “value add” and being a “trusted advisor” with independence. It also includes the results from two polls outlining the views of the audience of heads of internal audit on the extent of these pressures. The article concludes with some specific ways heads of audit might test their independence, but builds most welcomed to me on jcp@RiskAI.co.uk.

Download: Internal Audit Independence – in the real world

Culture & Internal Auditing – part 1

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I’ve had a run of requests to do speaking on Culture and Internal auditing, first for my friends at UNIAC, for about 30 Audit Committee members, then my friends at the IIA NorthWest and then CIPFA in London.

It’s a bit of a challenge trying to summarize the key headlines from the one day training workshops that I run into just an hour, but here are some key points:

My first key message is that looking at culture is an inevitable part of the development of Internal Audit as a profession, 15 years ago we started to take a greater interest in Risk management; then 5 years ago it was governance related issues, and now it is culture. To me this is just a natural part of Internal audit finding its place at the top table, since often the underlying reasons for issues that audit finds are cultural in origin (see also my blogs on Root Cause analysis).

In the UK financial services sector the need for audit to look at culture was identified in an interesting report “Effective Internal audit in the Financial services sector” issued in July 2013.

The report is short and easy to read and makes points that are pertinent to internal audit functions in the public sector and other private sector areas. I urge readers to look at the report if they are not familiar with it and to use it as a useful guide for the development of their internal audit strategy. Continue Reading

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