Internal Audit Assurance Adds Value, Enhances Governance

Internal audit is a manifestation of the traditional internal audits, generally known as “assurance work.” It provides independent assurance and ensures an organization’s risk management, governance, and internal control processes that are effective in operation.

Internal auditors
bear the burden of advising managers at all levels, evaluating risks, analyzing operations, confirming information, and working with other assurance providers, just as they do a level of advisory work, and aim to do more.

Great About Internal Audit

Internal audits help organizations to meet goals and objectives with internal auditors playing a variety of roles, including educating managements and boards on critical issues; monitoring compliance with laws and regulations; evaluating whether policies and procedures are being followed; as well as making recommendations on how organizations improve operations, reduce costs, enhance revenues or improve profits.

Three Benefits of Internal Audit to Businesses

Internal audit works to help an organization in three main ways, including:

Assurance

It helps here to obtain assurance on business governance, risk management, and control processes for businesses, assisting them to achieve their strategic, operational, financial, and compliance objectives.

Management and governing bodies most often rely on internal audits to evaluate if their firms are operating what they intended and if policies and procedures were being appropriately followed to ensure that they obtain valuable feedback on effective controls and mitigate significant risks.

Insight

A catalyst for improving an organization’s effectiveness and efficiency, an internal audit provides insight and recommendations based on analyses and assessments of data and business processes.

Internal audit professionals come with a broad range of backgrounds that serve in a variety of capacities and help businesses to identify risks and determine appropriate solutions. They analyze an organization’s array of activities and gain an in-depth understanding of every activity, becoming uniquely suited to provide advice to management on how issues in one department will affect another.

Objectivity

Internal auditors are capable of offering management teams or boards objective sources of independent advice, precisely, however, the value of internal audit is derivable from saving money, or compliance monitoring to avoid fines, enhance productivity, or protect a company’s reputation.

With assurance, insight, and objectivity, internal auditing assists with all of these, making the combinations most invaluable to an organization’s success.

Management Risk Assessment

Internal audit is fundamentally concerned with evaluating an organization’s risk management, acknowledging that all organizations face risks, taking, for example, risks to an organization’s reputation for treating customers incorrectly, health and safety risks, risks of supplier failure, risks associated with market failure, cyber security and financial risks to name but a few in key areas.

The key to an organization’s success is to manage risks effectively, more effectively than its competitors, and as effectively as stakeholders demand.

Between Assurance and Advisory Work

Assurance services are the objective examination of the evidence to provide an independent assessment of governance, risk management, and control processes for an organization.

Consulting services, on the other hand, are intended advisory and related client service activities that bother on the nature and agreed-on scope with a client to add value and improve an organization’s governance, risk management, and control processes without the internal auditor assuming management responsibility.

Though internal audits, boards, and audit committees primarily place focus on assurance work, advisory work adds more immediate and tangible value, improves relationships, and boosts internal audit’s profile of an organization, meaning that assurance activities remain the base hits that win games, but advisory projects, the sensation that cap it all, particularly when judiciously undertaken.

Generally, advisory efforts project to add value, and even much more to an organization than the necessary assurance efforts.

Indeed, well executed, and properly scoped, collaborative advisory projects demonstrate the track record of improving relationships and adding significant value to an organization.

For all of these, and with the world experience of pandemics in recent years, organizations have shifted a large percentage of their efforts to advisory works that were not previously of their audit plans as their business needs and risks evolved rapidly, and internal audit personnel, lacking the requisite skills required to help them in crises.

Internal Audit Assurance Advisory Services

Assurance services provide independent and professional opinions that reduce the information risk (the risk that comes from incorrect information).

The essence of an internal audit is to help management identify and respond to business and other control risks to mitigate these risks.

Internal audit assurance advisory services at SSAC Advisory and Professionals take on a Risk-based approach to support its clients to identify internal control gaps, and associated risks and develop appropriate process remediation actions to close noted gaps.

Involved in this now for over 35 years, SSAC is vibrant and confident of its service delivery in this regard, looking beyond financial risks and statements and taking on wider issues, including organizations’ reputation, growth, their impact on the environment, and the welfare of their employees.

It helps organizations to succeed, combing assurance and consulting to put organizations in the known on how well the systems and processes designed to keep them on track are working, and offering consulting to help improve those systems and processes where necessary.

It has become more than necessary that organizations include consulting assignments in their audit plans, particularly if an area or process has already been identified as requiring remedial action and the responsible business unit needs help and assistance to do this.

In principle, SSAC is committed to helping organizations better understand the benefits and value of internal audit with its extensive experience in internal auditing, risk management, probity, fraud and corruption prevention, cyber security, crisis management, business continuity, and climate risk management, just as it provides temporary Internal Audit support, outsourced/partnered IT Audit Services, Accountancy support, and a vast range of consultancy within its core competencies of internal control, risk management, and corporate governance/assurance.

On the whole, it provides consultancy services in such other areas, including External Quality Assessment Services, Benchmarking, Risk Management Facilitation, Assurances, Control Risk Self -Assessment, Education, Internal Audit Assurance; co-sourced, partnering, contracted, IT Auditing, IT Audit Services, Management & Leadership training, assessments, skills transfer, professional programs to develop teams, accredited professional training programs and support and Mentoring & Coaching all are issues that are fundamentally important to the survival and prosperity of an organization.

A crystal clear firm of business, success, profitability, growth, and sustenance, SSAC is a catalyst for value for money.