What it is to be an Internal Auditor?

Internal Audit / Internal Auditor may just be a work / job role for many, it was the same for me too.

Neither did I realised in my early days, nor it triggered to my senses why I prioritised, appreciated and always almost chose, internal audit assignments over others. My choices no longer existed, as I always went for IA than any other assignments. It was the only way for me.

Like we all know, we may do multiple nature of work, but IA is the one I was destined to. I found my passion in that.

If you are expecting me to tell what IA is from professional aspect, I strongly recommend reading various notes and write ups by many experts.

I’m here to tell you

• how I fell in love with Internal Audit.
• how I saw the internal audit
• how I saw myself as an internal auditor
• How I enhanced the scope of internal audits I took beyond boundaries

Everybody starts their understanding with some basics pillars on which they build their logics, knowledge and entire understanding. Each of these learning will be based on these pillars and every learning will first pass through the logical acid test on these pillars.

For me, the basic pillars of internal audit are logical sense, time sense and cost benefit. In addition to these, understanding, reasoning, convincing, are the additional pillars to grow and succeed.

Though I knew somewhere how to be a person, when I could correlate me as a person with what is it to be an internal auditor, the entire magical maze opened up waiting for me to explore the meaning of life to succeed.

Ok, let me explain.

What we do in a typical audit, at least what I experienced and learnt being a consultant working with many clients is that, we take up assignments, understand the entire process (from) many activities (from) many companies (from) many sectors in a very short time (comparatively), evaluate the process, controls in place for its reasonableness, identify gaps and lapses, recommend preventive, detective and corrective actions, and more than everything, the very important one, convince the process owner by telling them that the recommendation being provided is a better way than the existing process. This is nothing less than being a superman.

Simply saying we look for reasonableness in every action which - make sense, requires less efforts, less time, best output, right fit, etc.

Now, in our personal life, we are only being the process owners and hardly realised what it is to audit ourselves and those around us.

?     What if we could reason with our daily activities, daily fights, daily misunderstandings, miscommunications?

?     What if we could find logics, gaps, in our daily life?

?     What if we could try to prevent, detect and correct our lacunas, weakness, shortcomings?

Imagine the turnaround we could bring in life, for not just us, but for all those near and dear to us. Nothing like, understanding someone, their situation and supporting them in the best way possible after analysing the best possible solution.

So I started reasoning with every aspect of life.

?     Is this making sense?

?     Is this the best fit considering time and situation?

?     Is it worth it?

 Man, I felt like Ihave cracked the code of easy life; making it less complex, less stressful, less fights, less misunderstandings, less miscommunications.

Now this left me with a Dilemma, does a good person make a good internal auditor? Or the vice-versa?

This was like finding an answer to, which is first – an egg or a chicken? I stopped looking for the answer. But understood that, if you are a good internal auditor, you are a person with tools and ways to make your life better. If you already are such a person, no doubt you make a wonder internal auditor professionally.

And now you know, how to apply the professionally concepts personally or the other way round to optimize your knowledge and skills for overall success.

Let’s show the world that being Internal Auditor is not just a profession. It’s a way of life.

Yours truly

An Internal Auditor