My congratulations to David Dufek for his recent article for the IIA’s Internal Auditor magazine, Building a Better Auditor: Be Lazier.
He makes several excellent points, but misses one: it can take hard work to be what he calls “the good kind of lazy”.
He says, and I agree with him:
Being the good kind of lazy doesn’t compromise your responsibility — and can boost performance.
This is the central theme:
Auditing too much or too often can lead to diminishing returns.
He says a lot in a couple of sentences:
If you’re spending more time on minor details than the big picture, you might be auditing too much. We do not need to prove every opinion we have.
- We should not be spending any time at all on minor details. Let me repeat that: we should spend zero time on low risks, risks that don’t matter to the success of the organization. As I say in the title of my ground-breaking book on internal auditing, we should only audit what matters – to the board and top management as they endeavor to lead the organization to success.
- We are entitled to have a professional opinion. We do not have to prove that we are right; we are not in a court of law where controls are effective until proven guilty. We spend far too much time as a profession (and in the Standards) documenting why we have made an…
