Internal Audit

Ron Kral espouses the benefits of a well-designed system for financial reporting controls and provides five ways organizations can improve the effectiveness of their ICFR process. When Congress first mandated SOX for public companies, requiring them to document and assess internal controls over financial reporting (ICFR), many executives viewed the requirement simply as a compliance exercise. While some may continue to feel this way, the more successful companies have recognized that a well-designed control system can deliver greater efficiencies to...

Internal audit must know how to respond when business process owners want to go faster and document less (such as in Agile environments). Nielsen’s Kevin Alvero and Wade Cassels discuss what IA can do to meet these seemingly contradictory goals. In the five months between the crashes of the Boeing 737 Max 8 airplanes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that resulted in the deaths of 189 people and 157 people respectively, Boeing received multiple complaints from pilots about the Max 8’s...

Experts at Nielsen discuss how the internal audit profession is evolving to best suit board and senior leadership needs, as well as where IA is lagging.

Firms are increasingly leveraging transcription technologies to gain data insights, but they need to understand these applications to make informed choices.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is coming, and organizations must bolster their internal audit and compliance functions now to keep pace and minimize risk.

The audit profession is facing unprecedented demands, but there are a host of tools available to help. James Bone outlines the benefits to automating audit tasks.

An organizations’ weakest link is most often human, not technological. Moss Adams’ Francis Tam explains why, when it comes to cybersecurity, anomalies like daily logins, users and infrastructure changes should be an organization’s main concerns.

Gartner surveyed over 300 Chief Audit Executives (CAEs) in 2018 on their resource and time investments, priorities and challenges in 2019. Gartner VP Malcolm Murray examines the report’s key findings on the impact to the audit function.

Riskonnect’s Dawn Ward compares the traditional GRC view versus the integrated risk management (IRM) view of risks as they relate to internal audit and information systems teams. As Gartner continues to shift its focus from governance, risk and compliance (GRC) toward a focus on integrated risk management (IRM), many corporate functions are recognizing the operational significance. The shift doesn’t negate the relevance of GRC, but it does start the conversation about how IRM enhances GRC programs. One department poised to...

3 Tips to Help Organizations Come Out on Top "Compliance audit" is one of the last things a financial advisory firm hopes to hear, but it’s an inevitable, unavoidable fact of life for most. Fortunately, there are steps financial advisory firms can take to mitigate the requisite time and work of an audit, while paving the way to a successful outcome. Nuance’s Stacy Leidwinger discusses. The words "compliance audit" tend to strike fear and anxiety in even the most reputable,...

Turning a Key Vulnerability into a Victory No matter what an organization’s major market is, it is probably subject to regulatory compliance requirements, such as PCI, SOX, FISMA and HIPAA. Failing to comply with any of these requirements could result in a failed audit, which can incur hefty penalties. This article by Markku Rossi of SSH.COM shares one little-known reason why organizations are vulnerable to failing a compliance audit. No matter your organization’s major market or sector, whether you are...

As 2018 draws to a close, we’re taking a look back at some of the most valuable insights our authors have shared.  In case you missed it, this is one of the articles our readers couldn’t get enough of this year.   Risks Presented in Adopting RPA with co-author Barton Edgerton A large number of organizations are quickly moving to implement robotic process automation (RPA) across a wide variety of corporate functions, ranging from shared services to finance. Most audit...