Don’t Hate Your Internal Auditors – Do This Instead

Published by Yana on

In this Compliance That Makes Sense episode, we discuss internal auditors and why you shouldn’t hate them. People sometimes perceive internal auditors as useless, time-wasting, police playing, and always inflating problems while not being an expert in any particular field but still telling everyone else what to do. When I worked at Amazon, they loved their internal auditors; they wanted them to come and give the team an outside perspective with the best interest of the team and Amazon in mind. So listen as I give both sides of the argument about internal auditors and why you shouldn’t hate them.

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Today’s episode:

  • [00:34] Hello, my friends!
  • [02:53] At Amazon, the internal auditors would come and give the team an outside perspective.
  • [04:07] When you audit a function, and you don’t have experts on your team, you have someone from a different function join the audit.
  • [06:40] Internal audits always start with risk assessment.
  • [07:31] The idea of internal audits is to help the organization fix urgent things that need to be fixed for them to go forward.
  • [09:46] Listen, as Yana shares how she would like internal auditors to understand the risks involved by asking people.
  • [12:09] After you really understand the issues, you try to prioritize and develop an audit plan.
  • [15:15] Yana recommends that a startup have three to five dates per year.
  • [17:42] Yana prefers when the outcome of an internal audit is very specific and says something.
  • [20:15] If your internal auditor is only interested in you following your policy, then she would suggest you fire them.
  • [21:36] Thank you for listening!

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