CBOK: Interacting with Audit Committees

How well are internal audit departments meeting the needs of the audit committee, and is the internal audit department receiving the proper support and oversight from the audit committee? The overall answer to these two questions is that both groups are doing better, but there are many opportunities for improvement. Key insights in this report include:

• Although the numbers are increasing, there are still too many organizations without effective audit committees (or their equivalent).
• The frequency of audit committee meetings varies dramatically between regions—sometimes related to the nature of governance in a country, other times related to the maturity of the governance function.
• The opportunity for internal audit to meet with the board or audit committee in executive sessions without management present is quite low in some regions and needs to be improved.
• Governmental (and some private) organizations are lagging in developing effective audit committees (or their equivalent).

Author Larry Rittenberg, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, served as chairman of the Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) from 2004 to 2009. Current information about the interaction between audit committees and internal auditors was obtained from the CBOK 2015 Global Internal Audit Practitioner Survey, the largest ongoing survey of internal auditors in the world.