Financial Aid Internal Audits: Review of Operations, Policies and Procedures

Our institutional leaderships are continuously researching to find ways to attract a broader demographic to their university and implement unique ways to reach them. At the same time, our federal and state agencies are ever making changes to ensure their own policies are current with today’s climate. With adjustments happening on every side, it’s imperative that our institutional departments, especially Financial Aid departments, continue to review their daily operations and keep current their policy and procedures.

As often mentioned, Higher Education as a whole is suffering employee attrition in several departments, making it difficult to take time away from processing to go over their policy and procedures in detail. Employees are taking on double and triple their workload, leave little room to creatively come up with new ways to update their operations and automate their procedures.

While an institution evolves, grows, or diversifies, often the question arises whether its operations are also evolving accordingly. An “Operational Review” or internal audit, is intended to answer if the institution and it's departments are evolving according to its own mission and vision. The review is a holistic diagnostic of the health of the institution’s operations to determine if they are “fit for purpose” and provides a stress test to determine if the operations are fit to support future growth or, in some cases, future contraction. Along with reviewing departmental operations, policies and procedures, documents used for processing also need to be regularly reviewed and updated to stay up to date with the institution's progression.

Consulting Firms are seeing this strain on institutions and are adding this component to their consulting services. Outsourcing document review allows departments to prioritize and strengthen their most essential work. Using a consulting company to complete an Operations review allows for a knowledgeable and unbiased review of the department’s operations and can offer expert opinions on the changes that can be made to streamline processes, prevent or eliminate redundancies and to add policies and procedures that may be missing.

Consultants will typically start an engagement with a review of policies and procedures and build an exam to validate that employees are complying with internal control directives.? The intent is to avoid the disruption of workflow, the reality often becomes explaining process changes made, but not properly documented.

Consultants conduct their internal audit with at least these 5 areas in mind:

1. ???Provide objective insight

a.???? Departments have trouble auditing themselves without having a definite conflict of interest. By having an independent and unbiased view, the internal audit function adds value to your organization.

2.???? Improve efficiency of operations

a.???? By objectively reviewing your organization’s?policies and procedures, you can rest assured you are following those policies and procedures appropriately, and that they adequately mitigate your department’s unique risks.? Through ongoing monitoring and evaluation of your processes, consultants can identify suggestions for enhancing the department’s efficiency and effectiveness, ultimately enabling your organization to trust its processes rather than individuals.

b.???? Internal audits also spot redundancies in your daily practices, procedure, and governance processes; and develop recommendations for streamlining, saving time and money. They will then create associated workflows to ensure those that come after them can easily follow.

3.???? Improve Integrity of Processes??

a.???? Internal audits provide assurance of process integrity – that is, that systems work the way they were intended to work, and the way that management promises those systems work. These audits can identify risks of human error or other system failures, such as complicated software that might crash at critical moments. They will then fortify employee policy and procedure knowledge through training.

4.???? Improved Compliance

a.???? Internal audits check the federal and state laws and regulations with which your organization needs to comply, and then assess whether you are, in fact, compliant. Where you miss the mark, consultants recommend how to remediate the problem.

5.???? Areas to provide Automation

a.???? While correcting and updating procedures, consultants will also find areas that could easily be automated. This will increase productivity and minimize risks due to human error.

In conclusion, institutions should no longer say “once we are fully staffed" before they begin to research and implement updated departmental operations to mirror the institution's initiatives as reviews should be happening regularly. ?At Higher Ed Consulting, we understand the unique challenges faced by institutional departments in the ever-changing higher education landscape. Our team of experienced consultants, with little to no interruption to daily operations, can find ways to reinforce and streamline your operations, create and update policies and procedures, and train your staff to operate efficiently. ?Schedule a meeting today to see how we can assist you, www.hecenterprise.com