Читать книгу Beyond Audit - Robert L. Mainardi - Страница 24

When you work in an internal audit department, it does not matter what types of audits you execute, where you are located, the tenure of the leadership team and staff, how long your department has been established at the company, or how exceptional you believe your street credibility is with the business unit partners. You still need to market your audit department.

The fundamental question that every audit department should be asking themselves is, Do our clients know what we do and why we do it? Each time I facilitate training on marketing the audit department, I ask this very question, and the response is consistent. Not everyone in the company understands what audit's objectives really are, and most business partners just seem to tolerate the inconvenience of interruption to their operations when audit comes to town to review the business operations.

Trust me on this point: Audit departments do not want to engage with their business partners in the situation where the business personnel do not understand what audit does, why audit is in their operation, or how this particular business unit was selected for an audit in the first place. When the business unit lacks a fundamental understanding of the internal audit process, the audit and relationship starts off in a very strained position. Now, complicate this situation with a remote audit in which the auditors and business partners will not be meeting in person, and you begin to recognize the enormous hurdles that auditors must overcome to adequately communicate the purpose and details of the process to create a clear path for mutual understanding of how the audit will be executed. This further illustrates the critical need for the audit team to leverage their communication skills to be successful.

So, let us take the difficult task of marketing the audit department step by step. The first question you are probably thinking about is why it is such a difficult task. Marketing the audit department is difficult because throughout history, audit departments have carried a bad reputation of being nothing but an impediment for the business trying to complete its day-to-day responsibilities. From the business perspective, an audit is a disruption to daily operations because the auditors have to learn the business, ask questions, get system access, do process walkthroughs, ask more questions, pick samples, execute testing, find discrepancies, ask even more questions, and then issue a report stating what the business does poorly. Keep in mind, that is the business perspective, and while it does outline, at a high level, the general audit process, the audit is not actually much of a distraction to daily business operations. But you can understand why it is so challenging to try and market the audit process to a business owner when audit comes with all of these preconceived notions of being a disrupting force. Truth be told, effective audit departments communicate at a high level and leverage the minimal client meetings to obtain critical process information and data to complete the audit without bothering business personnel. The 10 characteristics of an effective department will be revealed and discussed in Chapter 12. But for now, the focus is on effectively marketing your audit department.