Back to Square One

This is going to be an unstructured post but I need to vent.

As my regular readers will know, my employment circumstances have been a ‘hit and miss’ affair over the past couple of years. Yet again, my current role is coming to an end and all I can see is yet more auditing on the horizon. In the pit of my stomach, I feel that a lot of the recipients of Internal Audit reports aren’t really that bothered. This is often compounded by Internal Auditors who focus unnecessarily on trivia which the business isn’t interested in. The legacy system may be breaking down but ‘it is what it is’, and there isn’t a quick fix without some serious capex which we all know won’t be forthcoming.

As long as the firm is making money, it is immaterial if certain controls are circumvented; as long as we make some money over here, it doesn’t matter than we lose some over here. If we take an inordinate amount of time processing outbound payments, have a few unnecessary steps to prevent recipients having the firm’s cash in their bank account, forget the ethics, we’re still in a win-win situation.

My other pain is that Internal Audit isn’t a career to the top. I can’t see where the mega-bucks are going to come from. I don’t see Internal Audit leading to the ‘bulge-bracket’ income frequently quoted in the City. While I want out of the Internal Audit profession, in the absence of another marketable skill, I can only see it’s going to be another basin full of audits, lack of documented procedures, manual workarounds and lack of spreadsheet controls for the foreseeable future.