Internal Audit Strategy: Focus area one – increasing client engagement
17 May 2022
Veritau launched a new three-year Internal Audit Strategy in late 2021, with five key focus areas
We’re sharing details of our strategy for Internal Audit Awareness Month, as it demonstrates the value internal audit brings and the diversity of our profession.
Now that we’ve introduced our strategy and its vision, mission, critical success factors and mission-critical objectives, we move on to the five focus areas.
Five focus areas
Our five focus areas are the main content of the Internal Audit Strategy. They represent the vehicle for delivery of our mission-critical objectives.
Each of our audit managers leads on a different focus area. Within each is an action plan and set of success measures to ensure that we monitor progress, learn and improve.
The focus areas are:
Spotlight on focus area one: Increasing client engagement
Having close and effective relationships with key stakeholders is an essential requirement for any internal audit service. Without this, delivery of the right work at the right time can be more difficult.
Covid-19 made some client engagement more challenging. A lot of communication has been remote and reactive, a proportion of which is likely to continue.
With this focus area, we aim to develop systems to capture and use existing client knowledge.
Our management lead
Working closely and having common understanding with our client leadership teams lays strong foundations for our work.
Assistant Director for Audit Assurance, Stuart Cutts, is leading on this area of the strategy:
Action plan
With each focus area, we’ve included an action plan to help us achieve what we want to achieve.
The action plan for increasing client engagement includes:
- Lines of communication
- Documenting opinion assurance
- Promoting wider work
- Improved knowledge sharing and closer inter-team working
- Buy-in of our strategy
Understanding our clients remains essential for us to deliver the best work we can. We need to identify, request and use information that is available more effectively for ongoing planning and assurance purposes.
Sharing knowledge and working closer should help us know more about our clients, and increase learning and inter-team working for our staff.
Focus areas two to five
We’ll continue to share details of the other focus areas from our strategy in our blog series for Internal Audit Awareness Month.
Next post: Introducing focus area two – setting a strategic planning framework
One-page summary of our strategy
View or download the "on a page" summary of our Internal Audit Strategy 2021-24
