Internal Audits Without Pain

If you work in a regulated environment, or in any environment in which you must comply with documented procedures, you probably are familiar with some of the procedures you must follow. Inevitably, there are some procedures that you don't understand quite so well, because they might be new, newly revised, or rarely used. Because you can't be certain that your understanding of all procedures is up to date, there is some doubt in your mind that you're doing everything by the book.

To add to your anxiety, auditors occasionally drop by to verify that you're complying with the requirements of all those procedures. The anxiety can be more intense if the degree of compliance the auditors find can be an important indicator of your career success.

Unfortunately, The people who devise procedures don't
always know whether the burdens those
procedures impose are sustainablethe people who devise procedures don't always know whether the burdens those procedures impose are sustainable. That is, the effort required to understand and comply with the procedures might not be consistent with the effort available, given the other constraints on your work, such as deadlines, budgets, and other procedures.

The problem you face can be challenging. Here are seven insights that can help ease the burden of working in procedure-driven, audited environments.

Auditors attend to deviations that create high risk

The deviations auditors most value are those that create the greatest risks. It isn't that the auditor wants to find noncompliance that generates risk. Rather, most auditors are even happier to find compliance in all areas where noncompliance generates high risk.

But either way, they must examine work products and processes for instances of noncompliance that create greatest risk.

Auditors often use sampling techniques

Many auditors are resource-constrained. Because their audits don't have enough resources or time to examine every attribute of every work product and process, they sometimes examine attributes determined by a random sampling method.

If you can determine what sampling method the auditors use, you can apply it to your own work to search for deviations in advance of the audit. Correcting what you find, in advance, can improve work output quality. Otherwise, there really isn't much you can do to anticipate what the auditors will examine based on random sampling, because it's random.

When you find deviations on your own, extrapolate

If you make self-auditing a part of your own work routine, you can improve audit results proactively. When you find an indicator of noncompliance, correct it, of course. But also examine analogous attributes of all work products and processes to repair any analogous deviations that might have occurred.

Auditors favor examining what's easy to examine

Clever auditors search for noncompliance in areas where noncompliance is easy to recognize when it occurs. A high cost of verifying compliance is a deterrent for resource-constrained auditors.

If examining a work product for noncompliance is laborious, then auditors are relatively less likely to examine that work product, all other factors being equal.

Audit tools reduce audit costs

Resource-constrained auditors can expand what they examine by employing automation. They create tools that examine work products to ensure that they're in compliance with standards. For example, if all documents must bear identifiers that comply with a standard for identifiers, writing a tool to check for this is a simple matter.

If you can get access to the tools yourself, you can ensure compliance with the standards that the tools measure. If you can't get access to the tools, you can create your own tools if you know what the tools check for.

Pay attention to what auditors found in the work of others

If you know what auditors found in the work of others, you can check for those same things in your own work. That much is obvious.

But knowing what auditors found in the work of others also tells you where the auditors looked. Even more important: because auditors usually find something wherever they look, knowing that they found nothing in some areas tells you where they didn't look. For either of these ploys to work, you need to exchange audit results with a group of colleagues who are subject to similar audits.

Some audits have specific agendas

Some audits arise as results of accidentally discovered incidents of noncompliance. Such incidents are often surprising to all concerned. They can even be embarrassing. The audits that result have agendas.

When an audit has an agenda, the auditors want to examine work products in which they expect to find deviations of a particular kind. Examinations can range more broadly, but they have a specific purpose: to eliminate as far as possible from the set of work products any noncompliance of the kind that matches the agenda of the audit. Be certain that you address that kind of noncompliance in advance.

Last words

Most important: your past performance is a guide. It tells you where unintentional noncompliance is most likely to re-occur. If you have a record of deviation in specific areas, auditors might examine those areas more carefully. But much depends on what were the causes of past deviations. For example, if in the past your noncompliance arose from failing to maintain currency in your understanding of some procedures, then focus not on the nature of the noncompliance, but instead on those procedures that have recently changed. In any case, analyzing the results of past audits is probably a good starting place.  Top    Next Issue

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