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Innovative
Audit Report Writing |
Audit Reports – your shop window
- Challenges of audit reporting
- Who are the reports really for?
- How do you know a good report when you see one?
- What Management expect – recent survey of chief executives
- IIA Professional standards
- The need for reports with impact
Exercise 1 : What are the factors
that distinguish an excellent report from the rest?
The problems with audit reports
Exercise 2 : Answer these 25 questions
about Internal Audit reports issued during the last 12 months
as truthfully and objectively as you can.
- Were the reports less than 8 pages?
- Did your reports refer to the organisation’s objectives
and how the audit recommendations would specifically assist
in their achievement?
- Have more than 95% of audit recommendations
been fully and successfully implemented?
- Did the reports include graphics and colour?
- Were they jargon free?
- Were they issued electronically?
- Did you only report on the major issues
found during the audit with the minor issues being dealt with
separately?
- Did the findings, conclusions and recommendations really
represent the key issues?
- Did the reports focus on the future
rather than the past?
- Did the management comments indicate real commitment rather
than simply a way for them to close the audit process and
get on to something else?
- Was the audit opinion a true reflection
of the overall conclusions? Did the key recipient accept this
audit opinion as valid?
- Were all findings or recommendations different from the
last time an audit of the area was carried out?
- Were all the audits conducted fully
recognised by the organisation as helpful and relating to
key business risks or opportunities?
- Were all the recommendations 100% practicable?
- Did the final report incorporate agreed
actions rather than recommendations?
- Were there named owners for each action?
- Were firm implementation dates agreed?
- Were all reports totally factually correct?
- Have you changed the report format
within the past two years?
- Were the reports a true reflection of the expertise, knowledge
and professionalism that went into the audits?
- Did each reports have an action plan?
- Have you asked management what they think of the reports?
- Did all the reports take less than
2 weeks to finalise?
- If you were the recipient would they have spurred you into
action?
- Do you believe that your reports are
as good as they could be?
Assessment and evaluation of your own reports
- Self evaluation against the model provided (delegates
are asked to bring along 2 or 3 recent reports) Reports
are then swapped with another delegate who will evaluate using
the same model
- Discussion of findings/ comparison with own evaluation/
identification of opportunities for improvement
- Key challenges and their implications
Best practice internal audit reports
– the way forward
- Key requirements of the audit report of the future
- How to draft a report with impact – discussion of
banner headlines and their relative impact
- Highlighting the issues that matter
- The psychological problem with reports
- Why audit reports are taken as a criticism of management
- How to get recipients to react positively
- How to write balanced reports
- How to get 95% of your recommendations actioned
- Title pages and indexes
- The Executive Summary –the benefits of writing the
Executive summary before the main report.
- Influence and Persuasion
Exercise 4 : Role play a meeting
with senior management to discuss the report
- Discussion of the implications – how to reflect the
key issues in the Executive Summary
- Messages rather than content
- Outcomes rather than output
- Solutions not problems
Exercise 5 Re-writing the Executive
summary of one of your own reports
The main report
- Audit Objectives
- Scope
- Forming and expressing the audit opinion
- Benefits and deliverables
- Conclusions
- The power of Senior management comments
- Words and phrases to avoid
- Best practice format
- Reducing the number of words
- The power of pictures and graphics
- The need to relate the issues to objectives and risk
- How to deal with sensitive issues in the report.
- Recommendations and actions
- Management Comments
- Action plans
- A Best practice report template
will be shared
Exercise 6 : Redrafting the objectives,
scope, opinion and conclusions in the main body of the
report
- Summary and action plans
Copyright Business Risk Management Ltd
2005
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