How to approach and develop an internal audit of ethics in an organization? - virtual session

TITLE:

How to approach and develop an internal audit of ethics in an organization?

OVERVIEW:

Ethics represents a cornerstone of internal auditing, not only as a profession but also as providing assurance of an organization’s ethical practices. As the ethical scandals and low public trust in government and business have persisted, it is imperative for the internal auditing profession to keep pace with the changing environment and help organizations to become more ethical in their doings. So, one of the main roles of internal auditors is to assess the ethics of an organization and give recommendations that will protect the organizations from unethical behavior.

TARGET AUDIENCE:

• Chief Audit Executives
• Internal auditors
• Compliance experts
• Compliance officers
• Senior managers

COURSE OBJECTIVES:

The Standard defines that the internal audit function is expected to assess the ethical climate at their organization as it is the auditor’s job to pull apart, test, and challenge an organization’s code of ethics. However, internal auditors should be very careful when tackling this problem. The politics, the confusions about ethics etc. can cause that internal auditors are not looking at the right things thus giving a false assurance to the board. So, in the seminar we will go through the role of ethics in the organization and then we will tackle the problem of what to look for in the organization regarding ethics, what and how to collect the evidence and at the end touch some special and sensitive topics.

COURSE CONTENT:

What is even ethics?

• Theoretical concepts
• Business ethics
• Compliance vs ethics
• Corruption vs ethics

How to develop an internal audit plan to audit audit ethics?

• The scope and goals of internal audit of ethics
• The most important areas of ethics in organizations
• Blind spots of ethics in internal audit

How to collect evidence?

• Wishful thinking vs. reality
• Importance of observations
• The role of behavioral experiments in auditing of ethics

Special topics: Role of compliance program in ethics

• Role of code of conducts in ethics
• Government and ethics

PREREQUISITES:

The course demands at least the intermediary knowledge of the standards, especially regarding the role of ethics in internal audit and basic internal audit concepts. Also, the homework of reading the material is mandatory as the seminar is based primarily on dialogue.