Internal Auditing Communications - Thinking Beyond the Audit Report

Why Should You Attend:

Internal audit’s credibility can be enhanced if it understands that it communicates constantly to all stakeholders, and only much later, through the audit report. This session will discuss:

• how to identify key stakeholders
• how to tailor the message to suit the target audience
• how to ensure consistency of messages
• how to use each member of the internal audit department in this endeavor

This presentation will help unpack the elements of a good communications strategy. It will depict how to consider the needs of multiple internal audits’ stakeholders – and how to address these meaningfully and provide a new level of assurance to them.

Areas Covered in the Webinar:

• Why developing a communications strategy is key to an internal audit’s success
• Understand your audience
• Targeting your message to suit your audience
• Understand why a good communications strategy is a key attribute of a strong internal audit function (as per Office of the Comptroller of the Currency)
• Appreciate the breadth of IIA Standard 2400 – Communicating Results
• Develop a communications plan specific to internal audit
• Measure the effort in terms of efficiency and effectiveness

Who Will Benefit:

• Head of internal audit functions
• Chief audit executives
• Senior auditors
• Investigators
• Board audit committee members and chairs

Instructor Profile:

Graham Joscelyne, CA (SA), CIA, CRMA, and managing director of Joscelyne & Associates, Inc., provides training for and assessments of internal audit departments. His clients range from regulated financial institutions through to large public and private businesses as well as not-for-profit organizations. He specializes in making sure the smaller internal audit function has the real impact. He brings wide internal audit experience as chief audit executive of a global development bank where he was the provider and recipient of quality assessments as well as a key stakeholder as chair of a multiple audit committees.

He consults to chief audit executives in part on how to leverage impact through the use of an effective communications strategy. He teaches external quality assessment methodology and has led multiple EQAs globally. His background in risk, assurance and oversight for more than 30 years across various businesses enables him to address key components of internal audit effectiveness and how interaction with its stakeholders is key to success. He has been active with the IIA on various international committees as well as locally.

Topic Background:

Too often, chief audit executives and senior internal auditors think about communications only terms of the Audit Report. In reality, the Audit Report is only one way of communicating to key stakeholders. And often it’s not the best way to impart essential messages – and happens late in the audit process. Effective communications take place earlier and follow more than one track to ensure that important messages are heard and acted on in the timely way.

Professional standards mandate that internal audit activity should think a lot more about communications that it often does. Internal audit thinks narrower than the profession intended and places far too much reliance on an audit report. Auditors spend time and money learning how to write an audit report as if it is the only way of communicating key information. Very little time is spent by internal audit leadership thinking up a coherent communications strategy – one that excites the internal auditor, engages management, the board, and others at the right time, in the right way, and with the key messages.

It’s no wonder that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency sees an effective strategy as a key criterion of a strong internal audit function. It takes the IIA standard as a ‘given’ and expands the tool. The objective is to impact the right people at the right time in the right way so that the organization is better off as a result.

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