What methods is your organization employing to compensate for missing skills of internal audit staff?

Hello Mr. Daoud,

we took the following steps as we are also facing the same situation in my current company,

1- Reduce coverage of Audit Area

   Example - Audit responsibilities are (i) Process Audits (ii) MIS REview in each quarter (iii) Ad Hoc Audits/Reviews. we shifted the quarterly MIS review to half yearly and also reduced the number of AD hoc Reviews.

2- Reduction in Sample Size - As we are in the same group for more than 2 years, we understand the process and system very well, as per experience in the group we reduced our sample size and increase the efficiency of Audit Staff.

3- Focus on Operational Audits rather than non Operational

This answer is purely as per my personal experience which we did in our present company that may differ the theoretical methods.

Thanks 

Abhinav

Hello Brother

Actually i am not sure what do you mean by your question (do you mean to overcome auditors manpower shortage or auditor auditing skills ?)

if you mean to overcome the manpower shortage in auditors, i am working in retail company (as internal audit) and we have more than 80 stores in each region so we moved from auditing each store on monthly basis to Risk Based Audit (we categorized all the stores based on the overall average and performance from A to E) and we defined a total number of audits for each class (example: class A stores will receive 4 audits per year, class B stores will receive 6 audits per year,...).

if a class A store showed a poor performance in one Audit, we downgrade to class B and readjust its targeted audits and so on.

If you mean to overcome auditors auditing skills shortage, only way to overcome that is to train them in field and send them with the most experts auditors in your team and if they are not improving you should replace them

Hope my answer was helpful

Regards