Internal Audit Awareness Month: Shedding light on our new strategy

9 May 2022

This Internal Audit Awareness Month, we’re promoting our three-year strategy developed by our audit managers

Internal Audit Awareness Month’s goal is to promote the work of internal audit and its importance. Run by the IIA, the month aims to raise awareness of the value the profession adds to organisations.

Following consultation with our auditors last year, we finalised our Internal Audit Strategy for 2021-24.

We wanted to raise the profile or our long-term vision via our new strategy, which demonstrates the variety of work internal auditors do and why it’s so important.

Our strategy provides a framework for future audit work, and sets out the direction we want to move in over the next three years.

Veritau’s vision

To deliver efficient, effective and professional assurance services which are responsive to the needs of our customers and which are held in high esteem.

This is what we want to be known for. Find out more on our company ‘about’ page.

Veritau’s vision is no different to what we want to deliver for our internal audit service. But we wanted to refine this and come up with a mission statement.

Internal audit service mission statement

To maximise our contribution to our clients’ success by providing risk-based and impactful assurance, insight and advice.

Our mission statement builds on Veritau’s vision and reflects our desires for internal audit service delivery.

In developing our mission statement, we looked to the IIA’s International Professional Practices Framework (IPPF), specifically the Mission of Internal Audit and the Core Principles for the Professional Practice of Internal Auditing.

Four critical success factors

‘Critical success factors’ represent the limited number of elements we need to get right in delivering our strategy. Centred on our position, our processes, our people, and our profession, they will enable us to achieve our mission and vision.

Our identified factors will provide real focus as we assess initiatives, projects and actions against them to ensure resources are dedicated to the most important activities:

Our mission-critical objectives

In striving to achieve our vision and mission, the strategy also establishes three ‘mission-critical objectives’. The objectives are shown on the inside of the triangle below, and their intended outcomes are in the corresponding orange boxes:

Implementing true risk-based planning is about building genuine flexibility into our approach to audit planning, and drawing on sources of intelligence to move at the speed of risk. By keeping attuned to risk we will be best positioned to deliver impactful work and provide genuine insight.

Reducing audit cycle times means we can be lean and adaptable, while still delivering quality at pace. We can be responsive to our clients’ needs and their changing circumstances, incorporating methods from agile auditing which put emphasis on:

• Limiting the amount of work in progress
• Promoting collaboration and engagement
• Focusing on outcomes over outputs

Delivering valued assurance – we wish to utilise data-driven approaches throughout the audit lifecycle and make more intelligent use of data. This will require continued investment in enhancing the data analytics capabilities and capacity of our internal audit service.

Introducing our five focus areas

The final aspect of our strategy is the five focus areas, which represent the vehicle for delivery of our mission-critical objectives.

Within each focus area is an action plan and set of success measures to ensure that we monitor progress, we learn and we improve.

The next blog post for Internal Audit Awareness Week will focus on the first of the five focus areas: Increasing client engagement.

Further links:

• Explore Veritau’s internal audit service
• Read more about Internal Audit Awareness Month
• Focus area one: increasing client engagement
• Focus area two: setting a strategic planning framework
• Focus area three: redesign and modernisation
• Focus area four: developing data analytics
• Focus area five: KPIs and added value