Internal Audit

The SEC has recently brought cases against national audit firms for audit failures – the first since 2009. This development signals a shift among regulatory agencies to hold financial gatekeepers more accountable. Candela Solutions’ Ron Kral offers five tips to help firms achieve maximal value from the external audit process.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has introduced a new auditing standard, AS-18, which is likely to present some challenges for companies – and their auditing committees in particular. In short, AS-18 is meant to enable auditors to best handle “related parties,” but this means more work than making basic inquiries. Read on to learn the full impact of the new standard.

As if the job of an IT manager or leader was not already challenging enough, today’s IT risk and regulatory environment is constantly increasing in complexity. Alongside this, there is an unprecedented proliferation of business devices, systems and data, creating more ever-changing risks. So how to deal with all of this? By combining people, process and technology, you can better manage and reduce IT risks. This eBook outlines 11 key steps to make your risk management and compliance activities work in a way...

Technological advancements have caused an increase in the number of opportunities to commit fraud – and they’ve created innovative new ways to perpetrate and hide it. As a result, there has been an uptick in reported incidents over the past two years and audit committees are facing considerable challenges when dealing with the increase. Paula Loop outlines the role the audit committee can play to help deter fraud.

The audit preparation process can be long and tedious, as documentation has to be gathered from departments that are unprepared or disinterested in the audit process. Confusion about what is actually required, who needs to provide it and when it must be completed is par for the course. Many people are guaranteed to forget whatever it was that they did to complete the prior request or think it is different from what was previously provided, generating multiple emails to get...

Assembling an audit committee is child's play. Building one that will be maximally effective, however, takes more finesse. And the strategy extends well beyond selecting qualified committee members. What does the charter include? How large is the team? Are they empowered to ask the tough questions? These are all key factors influencing just how effective your audit committee can be.

The trickiest part of investing is determining WHERE to invest. And while a company's financial performance is top of mind for potential investors, it by no means should be the only factor considered. Remember, corporations taken down by scandals crash and burn from what looked like sure financial footing. Those with an internal audit function are less risky investments by far.

The latest findings released today from the anticipated Deloitte and Compliance Week survey demonstrate a tidal shift with modern corporate compliance functions gaining more authority and stronger organizational support for compliance programs.

Today, Internal Audit is in a state of rapid transformation, thanks largely to cloud technologies. IT is rapidly modernizing our data centers from virtualization to software defined data centers so as to build out increasingly sophisticated private clouds.

As companies progress well into the implementation of COSO's 2013 Integrated Framework, it's become clear that the Framework's 17 principles aren't as cut and dried as they initially seemed. The 2nd, 4th, and 13th principles in particular have been problematic for some organizations. Candela Solutions' Ron Kral offers guidance on the issues that have left many auditors scratching their heads.

Survey shows reputational issues have a strong impact on customer confidence, brand value, and a company’s bottom line New York, Oct. 28, 2014 – The majority of global companies (76 percent) are confident that their reputations are strong, according to the 2014 Reputation at Risk survey conducted by Forbes Insights on behalf of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (DTTL). However, that confidence declines when it comes to protecting against and responding to reputation risks. In fact, only 19 percent of companies would award...

Just as risks are ever changing, so should our plans for managing them be. Internal audit must do away with tired approaches to risk management and adopt more dynamic practices in order to keep up with industry changes. Otherwise, the audit department may find themselves continually playing catch up when it comes to handling the various challenges that crop up.