I had a fair amount of time for reflection during my nearly month-long vacation over Christmas and New Year’s.
Here are some thoughts I would like to share.
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THE GOOD
1. Debates (in webinars and social media pieces) about whether a one-page (or no-page) audit report indicated a very healthy openness by practitioners to challenging traditional thinking.
More people have embraced my mantra of “tell them what they need to know, rather than what you want to say, when they need to know – in a readily consumed and actionable way”.
2. People are starting to realize that there is a massive difference between Agile Auditing (a fad) and the need to audit with agility. Congratulations to Clarissa Lucas on her 2023 published book about the latter.
3. There was a major reaction to the IIA’s draft Global Internal Auditing Standards, demanding more attention to (enterprise) risk-based auditing, the reinstatement of “insight” and “foresight” from the Core Principles, and more.
Drifting into the Bad, there were serious problems with the IIA’s draft. But the Good is that they established very low expectations for the final product (just released), and the 2024 final product is a very significant upgrade to the draft. Who knows what we would have thought of it if we had not first seen that draft!!
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The…
