The main objectives of operational audits
The main objectives of operational audits:
Defining the goals of any audit work is the first and fundamental step towards success.
Without defining specific, logical and understandable objectives, people participating in the process may request irrelevant documents during the process, conduct unnecessary interviews with people, review transactions and analyze features of the process. which is contrary to the priorities of the sponsors of audit work.
At the end, the auditors will provide recommendations and suggestions to improve the less important issues.
As a result, the lack of specific goals will lead to waste of time and money, frustration and annoyance of all people involved in the audit and damage to the reputation of the internal audit unit.
The goals of handling depend on various factors.
First of all, we need to specify whose goals the audit is looking for.
Internal audit should be careful not to define objectives unilaterally.
Although this may be necessary in certain circumstances, it should not be considered a dominant practice. Instead, internal auditors should involve management as much as possible in the goal-setting process to ensure that The procedures performed will meet the management’s needs or not.
The objectives of the investigation can be affected by the following factors:
New rules:
Rules may be internal to the organization (such as policies and procedures) or external to the organization (such as an agreement signed between the organization and one or two external groups).
Note that the new law could be the result of voluntary agreement, as with many aspects of social responsibility reporting.
Although some argue that CSR reporting is beyond the scope of internal auditing, and prominent economists such as Milton Friedman have challenged business leaders to devote time and resources to CSR reporting initiatives, there is a growing consensus that The existence of social responsibility reporting is a process that requires more participation, because this type of reporting considers three aspects.
In addition, as he has stated, several studies have compared the social performance of companies with eleven finances.
Although the results have been different, however, the study based on 95 surveys showed that in only four cases there was a negative relationship, 55 cases had a positive relationship, 22 cases had no relationship and 18 cases had a multi-way relationship.
Poor performance:
Inefficiencies, waste, rework, and customer and vendor complaints may lead to management intervention and, as a result, requests to submit issues that have been investigated by internal audit.