Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the current roles and responsibilities of the internal audit (IA) function and the factors perceived to be necessary to ensure its effectiveness. The current performance evaluation practices of IA are also examined....

Purpose –The use of computer-assisted audit techniques and tools (CAATTs) is a part of many professionally recommended audit procedures. This paper aims to argue that obtaining a better understanding of the factors underlying successful CAATTs adoptions would be helpful to aid wider...

Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to explore how internal auditing may recover from being one of the corporate governance gatekeepers that failed to prevent the global financial crisis. Design/methodology/approach –This paper draws on the theory of professions and provides a brief...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a synopsis of what academic literature says about internal audit (IA) effectiveness ten years after Bailey et al. (2003) presented research opportunities in IA. A new set of research questions that may help to bring the best out of IA is...

Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature and extent of internal audit functions’ (IAFs) involvement in environmental, social and governance assurance (ESG) and consulting in Australia. To identify emerging priorities, and the profession’s capacity to respond to...

The role of internal auditors is changing from a traditional audit approach to a more proactive value‐added approach where internal auditors are taking up partnerships with management. The debate of internal auditors needing to expand their repertoire has been around for many decades, though...

This article will explain why training is so important to the success of internal audit. Several new initiatives will be outlined covering the IIA’s new internal audit competencies, the NVQ scheme, learning and the so called “expert”, along with a newly developed three circles model. The...

Internal auditors have a direct interest in understanding how external audit firms make decisions that may have important implications for their own firm. Explores whether differently sized audit firms apply professional standards in a similar manner. Such uniform application should be expected...

This paper outlines the results of a survey designed to compare the opinions of internal auditors to one class of audit customers – namely management accountants. To function effectively, internal auditors and the customers of audit services should possess a similar understanding of what makes...

On every engagement, auditors are required to obtain a sufficient understanding of the internal control structure to plan the audit and determine the nature, timing and extent of audit tests. The evaluation of control weaknesses is important for error and fraud detection and for the avoidance of...