By Maurice Gilbert, CEO and Founder of Conselium
While playing a role on an audit committee is certainly a significant and important position for any professional, giving them the opportunity to share their own firsthand knowledge and skills, and put them to good use, it is also a job filled with high responsibility and stress, which many find incredibly taxing. Given the results of one recent survey, the level of stress being faced by these individuals is more than understandable. A few of the primary concerns addressed by this survey include issues of IT security, risk management, legal and regulatory compliance, growth risks, and audit committee effectiveness, all of which can be handled more effectively through the use of internal auditors as a valuable tool and resource.
As technology has continued to rapidly advance over the past decade, so too has the safety and security of information being shared and stored by these technologies become a priority concern for most organizations. Recently, the most important topics on this subject have included the issues associated with the recent advent of cloud systems, mobile technologies, and social media networking. While this subject maybe one of the most important that companies must now address, those auditors who responded to the aforementioned survey, sited it as the area in which they have been least informed, with little more than half stating that they felt satisfied with the current state of IT risk oversight procedures. This is where internal auditors can come in handy, functioning as support to audit committees and serving to develop a more objective and well-rounded perspective on the issue.
Nearly half of those who responded to the survey said they believe that the subject of risk management is yet another that requires a great deal of work, with companies needing to commit far more time and effort to the development and application of proper risk management strategies. Here, internal auditors may be able to lend a hand, by developing a more risk-based take on audit plans by promoting more thorough and comprehensive enterprise risk management strategies to those at the top of a company who will be in charge of relegating and driving this issue from the top down.
In the presence of new laws and regulations, such as those now being created and implemented by the Securities and Exchange Commission, audit committee members have a tendency to become highly uncomfortable for fear that one or more of these new issues will go overlooked creating a compliance threat. For this reason, many support the belief that a much greater focus should be brought to bear on this subject. Internal auditors may be of use in this area by helping to educate committee members through the collection and distribution of detailed background information on these matters.
Many committee members were sited in this survey as believing that their respective organizations had lost motivation and growth initiative, and had become stagnant. In order to rectify this issue, several have addressed the need for their companies to turn their attention towards risk assessment, the implementation of monitoring strategies, and the application of controls to help safely drive growth opportunities. Internal auditors can provide a great deal of value in this process by brining fresh perspective, skills, and knowledge to the planning table to help ensure that a company has all their bases covered before proceeding with these plans.
Finally, roughly half of those participants in the survey said that they believe there is a greater need for them to be able to assess themselves as well. Here they cited as some of the primary topics of assessing CFO performance, bringing together risk and strategy, keeping up-to-date on crucial developments, encouraging the diverse perspectives, and prioritizing matters more effectively.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
