To have an effective internal audit program, you shall have efficient, effective, and user-friendly processes.
Following are key points:
1. Centralized Tracking of your risk assessments every year
You must record and track your audit risk assessments and audit-related data in one centralized repository. It will help your organization compare the risks over time and build analytical and trend reports about your risks. It will be very effective to include that information in the annual audit report to your top management.
2. Review the items for internal Audit Plans
We recommend you list down and review the management requests before developing the annual audit plan. You might need to schedule group meetings, perform training, do required research and development, assist examiners and auditors, and other administrative tasks.
3. Effective Management of audit findings with a notification tool
You need to ensure that the tools you use (if any) can track the audit statuses, ownerships, due dates, follow-ups for action items to ensure they are completed promptly. The right kind of audit tool will send automatic notifications to department managers to assign and resolve audit findings.
4. Prompt Response from Management to audit findings
You need to put a team in place that will respond and have a mitigation plan for audit findings. You need to set expectations about the depth of the necessary response and any other activities that need to be completed.
5. Your Audit Plan shall reflect the principles and procedures for risk assessments and audit processes
You need to ensure that the audit process and the intent behind the same are documented in your annual audit plan. The documentation should be easy to understand and explain all necessary items and processes completed within your audit program.
6. Dashboard showing trend analysis and gap analysis
You need to have access to different dashboards to review and analyze data for the year. It’s easier to summarize the data in pie charts, bar charts, or other visuals.
7. Manage audit findings through action items
You should create reportable action items any audit findings that set the ownership of that item. The tools you use for Audit Management shall notify on due dates and hold management accountable for responses.
8. Create repeatable Audit tests
You shall create audit test plans and schedules at specific intervals. Generate reports and charts to manage the audit testing maintaining its accuracy.
9. Establish user-level training plans for audit software or tools
Train your administrators to generate enough data in the tools. Create users in the Audit Management System and set up a pilot system.
Once you confirm there are no issues, then release the platform/tool to the entire team.
10. Set realistic deadlines and timelines
Create tasks, set capacity, and set time requirements to ensure that the overall audit schedule and any due dates are reasonable for your organization’s audit program.
