Just so you know... here's a bit from KPMG's insights newsletter from December:
Companies are struggling to find qualified internal audit talent, as audit departments cope with greater responsibilities while needing additional -- and different -- resources.Corporate management is asking internal audit to find new ways to help achieve strategic objectives. They expect internal audit to extend its role beyond internal controls assessment, and use its quantitative skills and risk knowledge to help improve risk management and processes, and reduce complexity and costs.
To meet these responsibilities, internal audit departments generally require greater, specialized resources -- and that poses a challenge in the current business environment.
Euronet Worldwide Audit Committee Chair Jeannine Strandjord, who spoke at last week's KPMG Audit Committee Institute (ACI) roundtable in Kansas City, said the demand for talented internal audit professionals has increased appreciably.
"They [companies] are spending a lot more time finding qualified internal auditors," she said.
What, not scared yet? Ok - read that second paragraph again:
Corporate management is asking internal audit to find new ways to help achieve strategic objectives. They expect internal audit to extend its role beyond internal controls assessment, and use its quantitative skills and risk knowledge to help improve risk management and processes, and reduce complexity and costs.
And if that doesn't give you the cold chills - you've either never worked with auditors or someone needs to tell you that the hungriest competitors audit firm recruiters looking for "talent" are running into represent large law firms staffing up on consultants to give us all good advice on records management.
I think there are two broad ways to look at this. On the negative (but true) side you can see this as the further working out of data processing's takeover of the corporate client-server world - in this case by bringing in auditors from large firms with built in executive creduality and access to impose more and more controls with less and less flexibility.
Somewhat more cynically, you can see opportunity here -for example, a whois search just now didn't find an owner for rateyourauditor.com. More to the point the U.S. and some European markets will, I think, face significant IT body shortages to go along with the traditional IT skill shortage - and that too spells opportunty. Microsoft, for example, hasn't recently bought anyone making an automated audit client-server solution - and it doesn't take a lot of imagination or programming skill to sell something promising to help impede the flow of information in PC user organizations.
All joking aside, dealing with the average IT auditor is pretty simple, you just have to remember that they can read documents but not run systems - in other words, your controls will be adjudged adequate if and only if they're available in PowerPoints.