A recent post on LinkedIn by Tom McLeod made me think.
I first met Tom when I was facilitating a CAE roundtable in Australia for the IIA. He impressed me with his insights and progressive thoughts on internal auditing, which he not only talked about but practiced.
We have stayed in touch but have not met in person since then, to my regret.
His latest provocative piece has Tom speculating about internal audit in the future. He has wisely put a time on that future vision: before 2030.
I will respond here later, but before we can talk about what IA should do, we have to go back and think about why we need to exist in the first place!
I will share my view, which (to nobody’s surprise) is not fully aligned with the IIA’s Purpose statement:
Internal auditing strengthens the organization’s ability to create, protect, and sustain value by providing the board and management with independent, risk-based, and objective assurance, advice, insight, and foresight.
That may be close to what we do, but it is not why we do it.
Our primary customer is the board of directors (talking about corporations, which is where I served as CAE).
Why do they exist and what is their purpose?
That goes back to the fact that the owners of a corporation are not (with a few exceptions) the same people as those who are running it,…
