Internal audit services

Internal audit services

An internal auditor who operates within the organization, answering only to the Board of Directors and autonomous from all other departments of the organization, plays a critical role in maintaining internal controls and ensuring that financial statements and other reports prepared for the Board and presented to stakeholders accurately reflect the transactions and balances of all assets, liabilities, revenues and expenses in the firm. However, the expense of hiring, training, and maintaining an internal audit department, and the challenge of ensuring that it operates truly independently of the rest of the organization, is an extremely costly proposition in all respects – time, money, and manpower. Why not outsource your internal auditing to a team of experts in the field of financial accounting and auditing?

Remember that internal auditing is not the same as an external audit, which is an assurance engagement. If you hire an accounting firm to provide internal auditing services, you must hire a different firm, independent from both the internal auditor and from the firm itself, to provide an assurance engagement and audit opinion. However, internal auditing is useful for any organization, including one which does not want or need to have its financial statements audited, to help prevent material misstatement of balances and to help detect fraud and misrepresentation.

Internal auditing services can be provided to any firm, regardless of its size.

Although an in-house internal auditing department is a rewarding endeavour which reduces risks, greatly improves the detection of error and material misstatement of financial reporting, and identifies previously undetected problems with operations, the setup costs and expertise required may be too much for your firm to bear. If that is the case, we can help by providing internal audit services for our clients.

Providing internal audit functions for our clients begins with risk assessment, which will be conducted on an ongoing basis with periodic reports to management identifying risks and suggesting potential solutions which would involve the design and implementation of the necessary internal controls. We would help with the creation of these controls and then perform the testing required to ensure their continued effectiveness. The internal controls would be suggested based on our experience working with other firms in similar industries, and of similar size and economic outlook, but we would ensure to also tailor them to meet your specific and individual circumstances.

As part of the internal audit services we provide, we also monitor the financial recording done by the in-house bookkeeping and accounting staff, whether it adheres to generally accepted accounting principles as well as the standards of your industry’s financial reporting. We will also work to detect potential errors and misstatements, analyze their cause, and work to prevent their recurrence. As a trusted, arm’s-length third party, we can also work to detect collusion amongst employees or other potential sources of fraud within the company.

Other functions we can perform with regard to internal auditing include reviews of quality assurance programs and policies, as well as data analytics. Whatever your needs, we can meet them for you, aware that one size does not fit all! Contact us to learn more about the internal audit services we can provide for you.