KnowledgeLeader Blog

10 Important Roles of the Audit Committee in Internal Audit

Although the exact nature, charter, scope and reporting lines of internal audit may vary between companies, the audit committee plays a key role in supporting and overseeing aspects of an internal audit function’s activities. While needing to ensure that it does not assume day-to-day oversight activities on behalf of management or the internal audit function, the audit committee should generally be involved in the following matters:

Social Media Risk: What it Means to Your Risk Profile

Social media platforms and applications have been implemented rapidly by most organizations over the past decade. New ways to utilize social media crop up weekly and new social media tools seem to hit the market just as frequently.

Positioning Compliance for Effectiveness

Positioning the compliance function for effectiveness is a matter of first defining the roles executive management and the board want the function to play. An understanding of those roles provides a powerful context for evaluating how to position the compliance function within the organization.

Making Your Risk Assessments Count: A Compliance Perspective to Risk Assessment

The traditional approach for assessing compliance risks focuses on the severity of impact and likelihood of occurrences, often on a residual risk basis. This approach often results in a cluster of low likelihood risks with various levels of potential severity and fails to address the potential implications to the enterprise of a breakdown in established policies and procedures. For compliance risks, in lieu of mindless guesswork on probabilities, companies should consider the effects of noncompliance events in terms of the following factors:

Making Your Risk Assessments Count: An Operational Perspective to Risk Assessment

Operational assessment is often directed to assessing performance against quality, time, innovation and cost targets to identify gaps in process performance. Significant performance gaps lead to decisions around making appropriate midcourse corrections or analyzing root causes with the objective of determining actionable process improvements to close the gaps. Given this traditional approach to an operational review, the question of the appropriate level of focus arises when evaluating operational risks.

Making Your Risk Assessments Count: Consider the Distinguishing Characteristics of Risk

Traditional risk assessment approaches don’t often address the unique risk characteristics most companies face. While using a common analytical framework to evaluate risks with different characteristics may make the assessment process easier to execute, it also may not be as effective as approaches that could provide more insight into how to respond to assessed risks.

Many auditors are asking themselves the same legitimate question: With so much happening, where do we start?  Advancements in technology and data have been so rapid in recent years that long-standing organizations that failed to pay attention have been disrupted and displaced by so-called “born-digital” competitors. In the case of many organizations who met their fate at the hands of born-digital competitors, it was often a lack of activity – or, at least, a lack of the right activity, at the right pace – that allowed for the rise of the disruptors and led to the demise of the disrupted. It is not hyperbolic to suggest that digital risk is an existential risk for many organizations if ignored.

Cybercrime is now considered a top risk to most enterprises. Many organizations seek to build security by adding tools and processes on top of their established operations. It’s important for these organizations to take different approaches and see what results in greater momentum and more effective investment.

Are You Familiar With Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic process automation (RPA) has been gaining traction as an efficient way to automate labor-intensive and repetitive tasks across a variety of business functions, including finance, accounting, technology, legal, HR, and, increasingly, audit and compliance.