I thank the 127 people who answered my survey. I think you will find the results interesting.
As a reminder, I had asked that only internal audit practitioners complete the form.
As with the earlier risk management survey, the results may be a little biased as the respondents are all people who follow me on LinkedIn and/or on my blog.
There are a great many questions I could have asked but limited this survey to 12 questions. If you would like a future survey to address other issues, please add a comment with your suggestions on the blog (i.e., all in one place).
The first two questions were about the length of audit engagements.
X
126 answered the first:
- What is the average length of an audit or consulting engagement in hours?
- 40 hours or less… 5.6%
- 41-100… 16.7%
- 101-200… 19.0%
- 201-300… 21.4%
- 301-400… 18.3%
- 401-500… 7.9%
- Over 500… 11.1%
Over my two decades as CAE, I led teams with two different approaches to assurance engagements.
At Solectron, I would send a team of about 5 people for 2 weeks to one of our global sites (a manufacturing or assembly operation) where they would assess controls over a variety of significant enterprise risks: financial, operational, technology, and compliance. The average length was about 600 hours. However, we also performed audits of corporate functions that…
