Georges Selim

Risk Management and Internal Auditing: What are the Essential Building Blocks for a Successful Paradigm Change?

The internal audit function that ventures into building links with risk management creates immense opportunities for the internal auditor through enabling the alignment of the audit universe and the audit plan with the organizations strategic objectives and operational plans. A successful venture into this new field is heavily dependent on a number of prerequisites which need to be present for such a development to be successful. This paper presents the results of a study carried out by the authors involving 29 organizations spanning Europe, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Outsourcing the Internal Audit Function: A Survey of the UK Public and Private Sectors

Although not a new phenomenon on the business scene, outsourcing nowadays is occurring on a much broader scale and often encompasses a wide variety of traditionally in-house activities. Whether, however, the practice of outsourcing the internal audit function is occurring on the scale and extent that has been often depicted, is an issue open to debate. This paper reports the results of a questionnaire survey carried out in the UK public and private sectors on the issue of outsourcing internal audit. The authors believed that some degree of hesitancy is present among organisations when it comes to outsourcing the internal audit function. This is supported by the survey findings which indicate that organisations which have embraced outsourcing and have entrusted the provision of a broad range of services such as cleaning, information technology and security to outside service providers, are not so keen to outsource the internal audit function and instead are keeping it in-house.

The Risk Management and Internal Auditing Relationship: Developing and Validating a Model

Hypothesized relationships between internal auditing and risk management have been the subject of anecdotal evidence for a long time. This paper reports the results of a study carried out in 29 organizations spanning Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. A model describing the interface between internal auditing and risk management was developed through careful review of the literature and in?depth interviews in 15 organizations in both the private and public sectors. The model was then validated through a second set of interviews in a different group of organizations (14 in this case)