Now is an opportunity for internal audit leaders to pause, reflect, and consider whether it is time to leave past practices – even if they have proven remarkably successful – for a different approach to internal auditing.
As I said to the author of Reassessing Risk: What Matters Most Now?:
“Never has business changed so much, so fast”
“As the business is probably going to be run differently, so shouldn’t we run internal audit differently?”
“Doing a traditional audit that takes weeks, if not longer, is not necessarily going to help business leaders run the business today”
Another article that appeared this month in Internal Audit 360o was The Value Challenge in the Evolution of Internal Auditing. The Italian authors, a CAE and a manager in a consulting firm, said:
The recent macroeconomic developments emphasize a change that is already taking place: remaining anchored to the most traditional and archaic conception of the internal audit mandate exposes the profession to the highly probable and impactful risk of losing relevance, progressively emptying not only its perceived value but the real content of the profession as well.
We live in an era of epochal changes which demand an evolution of the internal audit profession. Paraphrasing Darwin: if we as auditors will be more reactive to change…
