2014-11
It’s been a year since the IIA’s Pulse of the Profession report revealed that only 4% of audit coverage was being devoted to strategic business risks.
The report identified a major opportunity for internal audit to realign with stakeholder priorities, stating: “The limited coverage on strategic business risks appears misaligned with respondents’ assessment of the importance of this area to stakeholders. For example, 53 percent of respondents identify strategic business risks among the top five priorities for their audit committee and 71 percent identify it as a top priority for executive management.”
That means that a whopping 96% of audit effort can be said to be not in alignment with stakeholder priorities as of one year ago. The report added that almost 60% of respondents had no coverage of strategic risks whatsoever in their audit plan.
However, internal audit leaders know they need to be more relevant, more valuable, and have a better seat at the table. Updated survey figures are eagerly awaited, but we’ve been seeing clear signs that ACL customers are moving the bar on strategic risk coverage—and subsequently becoming sought after for their insight.
Case in point: we interviewed some of our customers about how they are using technology to help them better align with their organization’s objectives and risks, and become more sought after in their organizations. Here are a few examples of what they’re doing:
“If I was to look back and think if we did not have ACL what our reports would look like, I think they would look completely different because now every project that we work on, we are trying to find million dollar opportunities.” – Willy Lira, Senior Manager, Corporate Audit, Safeway
“What it has allowed us to do is to move to a strategic focus, to go from 10% of strategic areas to over 40% and that makes us more relevant to the stakeholders.” – Blair Richards, Senior Manager, Australia Post
“Finance will be calling audit asking us to help them when it’s their data that we’re using to answer their question.” – Dave Coderre, Public Servant in Residence, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa
“We’ve been able to use ACL and leverage it to help go into those particular operations, for example, logistics, and really to help them out to figure out how they can start putting in more discipline into the operations.” – David Bigsby, Manager, Internal Audit, Novelis Inc.
(Source: ACL Blog)
